Boundary value problem of calculating ray characteristics of ocean waves reflected from coastline

A direct variational method for solving the problem of finding ocean wave rays reflected from the coastline with given positions of the source and the point of observation is considered. It is shown that the original boundary value problem can be reduced to the direct search of stationary points of the functional equal to the time of wave propagation along the ray. Information about the objective function in the area of solutions to the ray tracing problem allows us to construct a systematic procedure for finding minima, saddle points, and maxima. A feature of the proposed approach is the optimization of the ray reflection point along a given coastline.