Hourly-scale coastal sea level modeling in a changing climate using long short-term memory neural network

Abstract

In this study, a coastal sea level estimation model was developed at an hourly temporal scale using the long short-term memory (LSTM) network, which is a type of recurrent neural networks. The model incorporates the effects of various phenomena on the coastal sea level such as the gravitational attractions of the sun and the moon, seasonality, storm surges, and changing climate. The relative positions of the moon and the sun from the target location at each hour were utilized to reflect the gravitational attractions of the sun and the moon in the model simulation. The wind speed and direction, mean sea level pressure (MSLP), and air temperature near the target point at each hour were used to consider the effects of storm surges and seasonality of the coastal sea level. In addition to the hourly local variables, the annual global mean air temperature was considered as input to the model to reflect the effect of global warming on the coastal sea level. The model was implemented using several input lengths of the annual global mean air temperature to estimate the coastal sea level at the Osaka gauging station in Japan. Several statistics such as the mean, the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency, and the root mean square error were used to evaluate model performance. The results show that the proposed model accurately reconstructed the effects of the gravitational attractions of the sun and the moon on the coastal sea levels. The model also considered the effects of fluctuations in the wind speed and MSLP although the coastal sea levels during were underestimated strong winds and low MSLP conditions. Lastly, introducing a longer duration annual global mean air temperature improved model accuracy. Consequently, the best results show 0.720 of the NSE value for the test process.

Keywords: Coastal engineering; Deep learning; ERA5; Global warming; Recurrent neural network; Sea level rise.