Coastal Flooding Risk Assessment Through Artificial Intelligence

An effective system for forecasting coastal flooding due to wind waves is essential to prevent coastal risks. The forecast data provided by national and international agencies (i.e., ECMWF, NOAA, etc.) represent only the offshore condition and therefore additional numerical models, which take into account the several phenomena occurring in the nearshore area, must be implemented to correctly assess the risk of coastal flooding. Unfortunately, such models require high computational costs, which are often too demanding and not viable for large scale forecasting system. In this context, this paper presents the development of an Artificial Intelligence approach which allows for a fast prediction of the coastal flooding due to waves. Here, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are proposed. The ANNs are fed with the offshore wave data and provide the wave setup and the wave runup on the beach. The application is conducted for the village of Santa Maria del Focallo, which belongs to the municipality of Ispica, in the Southeast side of Sicily. The preliminary validation of the adopted approach is promising although further tests must be conducted.