A copula approach for sea level anomaly prediction: a case study for the Black Sea

Forecasting future sea levels is of great importance in terms of the conservation of coastal areas, monitoring and forecasting coastal ecosystems, and the maintenance and planning of coastal structures. In addition, highly accurate sea level forecasts allow adequate water management policies and coastal infrastructures to be developed. Today, many methods, such as harmonic analyses, artificial neural networks and support vector machines, are used to predict sea level anomalies. In this study, a novel approach based on Copula functions is presented for the prediction of sea level anomalies. The primary purpose of this study is to examine the applicability and capability of Copula-based prediction models in predicting short-term variations in the sea level. The minimum 95% correlations and minimum 22 mm RMSE values in sea level anomaly predictions during the testing period indicate that the Copula approach can be a powerful tool in the prediction of sea level anomalies.