Spatio-temporal prediction of suspended sediment concentration in the coastal zone using an artificial neural network and a numerical model

A problem of predicting suspended particulate matter (SPM) concentration on the basis of wind and wave measurements and estimates of bed shear stress done by a numerical model is considered. Data at a location at 10 km offshore from Noordwijk in the Dutch coastal area is used. The time series data have been filtered with a low pass filter to remove short-term fluctuations due to noise and tides and the resulting time series have been used to build an artificial neural network (ANN) model. The accuracy of the ANN model during both storm and calm periods was found to be high. The possibilities to apply the trained ANN model at other locations, where the model is assisted by the correctors based on the ratio of long-term average SPM values for the considered location to that for Noordwijk (for which the model was trained), have been investigated. These experiments demonstrated that the ANN model's accuracy at the other locations was acceptable, which shows the potential of the considered approach.