Derivation of coastal wind and wave parameters from offshore measurements of TOPEX satellite using ANN

The paper discusses an artificial neural network (ANN) approach to project information on wind speed and waves collected by the TOPEX satellite at deeper locations to a specified coastal site. The observations of significant wave heights, average wave period and wind speed at a number of locations over a satellite track parallel to a coastline are used to estimate corresponding values of these three parameters at the coastal site of interest. A combined network involving an input and output of all the three parameters, viz., wave height, period and wind speed instead of separate networks for each one of these variables was found to be necessary in order to train the network with sufficient flexibility. It was also found that network training based on statistical homogeneity of data sets is essential to obtain accurate results. The problem of modeling wind speeds that are always associated with very high variations in their magnitudes was tackled in this study by imparting training in an innovated manner.