An advanced spatio-temporal convolutional recurrent neural network for storm surge predictions

Abstract

In this research paper, we study the capability of artificial neural network models to emulate storm surge based on the storm track/size/ intensity history, leveraging a database of synthetic storm simulations. Traditionally, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solvers are employed to numerically solve the storm surge governing equations that are Partial Differential Equations (PDE) and are generally very costly to simulate. This study presents a neural network model that can predict storm surge, informed by a database of synthetic storm simulations. This model can serve as a fast and affordable emulator for the very expensive CFD solvers. The neural network model is trained with the storm track parameters used to drive the CFD solvers, and the output of the model is the time-series evolution of the predicted storm surge across multiple nodes within the spatial domain of interest. Once the model is trained, it can be deployed for further predictions based on new storm track inputs. The developed neural network model is a time-series model, a Long short-term memory (LSTM), a variation of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), which is enriched with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The convolutional neural network is employed to capture the correlation of data 1