We are trying to calculate a average shoreline position from a collection of shorelines dating from the 1880s to the present, the purple lines shown on the map below:
We want to create some code that averages them to create a baseline shoreline, something like the hand-drawn black line on the map. Ideally the resulting line should fall in the middle of the shorelines and also cross inlets.
We were thinking to just take offshore transects every so often, compute the mean, and then spline fit the resulting points, but it seems there are lots of things to consider here that could cause problems.
Does this approach sound reasonable? Or is there a better way to do this, ideally in python?