Predictions of typhoon storm surge in Taiwan using artificial neural networks

Accurate predictions of storm surge and surge deviation are essential for industrial activities in coastal areas. Usually numerical hydrodynamic models or empirical methods are used to estimate the storm surge. This paper proposes an alternative back-propagation neural network (BPN) approach to forecast the storm surge and surge deviation. The prediction of storm surge from a previous typhoon is used as a training set to form predictions for the next event. Wind velocity, wind direction, atmospheric pressure and astronomical tide were selected as inputs in the neural network. The observations obtained during three typhoons from four stations in Taiwan were used to illustrate performance of the BPN model. Comparisons with numerical methods indicate that the storm surge and surge deviation can be efficiently predicted using BPN. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.