Storm-Surge Residual Forecasting Using BPNN Driven by ADCIRC-SWAN Outputs and Associated Hazard Analysis in the Pearl River Estuary

Abstract

Storm-surge residuals represent one of the most destructive marine-coastal hazards, and reliable short-term surge residual prediction is critical for coastal disaster preparedness. Conventional empirical forecasting approaches suffer from limited cross-regional generalization, while high-fidelity physics-based hydrodynamic models such as ADCIRC-SWAN can reproduce complete storm-surge physical processes but demand substantial computational resources. In this study, a three-layer back-propagation neural network (BPNN) for storm-surge residual forecasting is constructed, which is driven by output datasets from the validated ADCIRC-SWAN coupled hydrodynamic model. Wind speed, significant wave height, sea-surface atmospheric pressure, and the simulated current-time storm-surge residual are selected as input predictors. Simulation-derived samples are pre-processed via data cleaning and Min-Max normalization, and two different dataset partitioning strategies (random mesh-point-based partition and time-sequential partition) are implemented for comparative experiments. After hyperparameter sensitivity tests, the optimal network configuration with 30 hidden-layer neurons is determined. Model predictive performance is quantitatively evaluated via multi-station time-series comparison and universal statistical metrics including R, NSE, and RMSE. The results show that the BPNN achieves satisfactory performance under random mesh-point-oriented partitioning, yet obvious performance degradation occurs under time-sequential temporal extrapolation, with prominent underestimation of surge peaks. On the basis of BPNN-predicted spatial surge residual fields, storm-surge intensity grading is carried out following the Chinese national standard GB/T 39418-2020. Statistical comparisons between the full computational domain and the Pearl River Estuary sub-region reveal strong spatial aggregation of high-intensity storm-surge grids within the estuary driven by funnel-shaped topographic amplification. This work demonstrates the feasibility of using a BPNN as a surrogate emulator for hydrodynamic outputs under a given typhoon condition; however, limitations in temporal extrapolation performance still need to be addressed before this approach can be practically used in operational early-warning applications.