Abstract
Sea level prediction is an important phenomenon for making reliable oceanographic and ship traffic management decisions especially for Bosphorus Strait that has no permanent sea level measurement stations due to high cost. This study presents artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, such as Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) to predict the seawater level in the Bosphorus Strait. In addition, the Multiple Linear Regression model (MLR) is constructed and employed as a benchmark. The dataset employed in developing the models are wind speed, atmospheric pressure, water surface salinity, and temperature data, which were measured between September 2004 and January 2006. The results reveal that all ANN and SVM models outperform MLR and can predict the water levels quite accurately. ANN has a better performance than SVM for predicting sea level in the Bosphorus by coefficient of correlation (R) = 0.76 and root mean square error (RMSE) = 0.059. Moreover, the influence of the Danube River discharge in the prediction is investigated in the present study. The discharge of the Danube River by the lag time of 70 days yields the highest performance on ANN by increasing R to 0.82 and decreasing RMSE to 0.048.
Highlights
Bosphorus is a natural strait, located in northwestern Turkey, which connects the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea (Figure 1)
The optimal structure of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) was determined for the input Set 4 (3-8-1), with correlation coefficient (R) = 0.76 and root mean square error (RMSE) = 0.0587 (Table 3)
Set 4 includes water temperature difference (WTD), water salinity difference (WSD), northern wind gust at station F (NWGF), while Set 10 includes WTD, WSD, APF (Table 2). This indicates that ANN is more sensitive to the wind, while Support Vector Machines (SVM) is sensitive to the air pressure for Bosphorus Strait
Summary
Bosphorus is a natural strait, located in northwestern Turkey, which connects the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea (Figure 1). It is the only way for Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia (SouthWestern part) and Ukraine to reach the world’s oceans (through Mediterranean). It has played a significant role in world maritime trade. Its complicated geometry makes the Bosphorus Strait as one of the world’s most difficult waterways to navigate. The extremely fast current in the strait, which is controlled by the water level differences at both end of the strait, makes it even more difficult to navigate.
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