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Shelf Sea Modelling Research Group

Coastal Engineering

traeth crugan

In this area of research, I use a range of numerical techniques to simulate seasonal changes in the coastal zone due to interannual variability of wind and wave climates. Central to this research is the development and application of novel numerical and soft computing techniques, and I collaborate with Prof. Alan Elliott (Bangor University) and colleagues at the University of Shiraz in Iran (Dr Reza Hashemi). We have developed novel and economical methods of applying the spectral wave model SWAN (Neill et al., 2008), applied techniques which have filtered through from the area of structural mechanics (Differential Quadrature) to surge prediction (Hashemi et al., 2008), and used Artificial Intelligence (Artificial Neural Networks) to simulate seasonal evolution of beach profiles (Hashemi et al., 2010).

beach profiles

Our latest results (Hashemi et al., 2010) demonstrate that provided good quality input data exists, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) can be used to successfully predict the seasonal evolution of beach profiles. Although requiring considerably less computational effort than physics-based mathematical models, the application of ANN is limited to the historical training data and cannot be applied in hypothetical situations such as extreme events which have not been incorporated in the training data. The combined application of mathematical models and artificial intelligence is recommended to model these scenarios.

 

Relevant Publications