249

Real time wave forecasting using

wind time history and genetic
programming
A.R. Kambekar1 and M.C. Deo2
1Faculty,
Department of Civil Engineering,
SPCE Andheri (West) Mumbai 400 058, India,
E-mail: arkambekar@gmail.com
2Professor, Department of Civil Engineering,

IIT Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400 076, India,

E-mail: mcdeo@civil.iitb.ac.in

Abstract
The significant wave height and average wave period form an essential input for
operational activities in ocean and coastal areas. Such information is important in
issuing appropriate warnings to people planning any construction or instillation works
in the oceanic environment. Many countries over the world routinely collect wave and
wind data through a network of wave rider buoys. The data collecting agencies
transmit the resulting information online to their registered users through an internet or
a web-based system. Operational wave forecasts in addition to the measured data are
also made and supplied online to the users. This paper discusses operational wave
forecasting in real time mode at locations where wind rather than wave data are
continuously recorded. It is based on the time series modeling and incorporates an
artificial intelligence technique of genetic programming. The significant wave height
and average wave period values are forecasted over a period of 96 hr in future from the
observations of wind speed and directions extending to a similar time scale in the past.
Wind measurements made by floating buoys at eight different locations around India
over a period varying from 1.5 yr to 9.0 yr were considered. The platform of Matlab
and C++ was used to develop a graphical user interface that will extend an internet
based user-friendly access of the forecasts to any registered user of the data
dissemination authority.

Keywords: wave forecasting, time series forecasting, genetic programming.

1. INTRODUCTION
Waves in the ocean continuously change in their height, period and direction because of
corresponding variations in the wind and the effect of other met-ocean factors. The knowledge of
wave heights and periods forms an important input for planning and design of harbors, oil platforms,
and coastal structures as well as for shipping and construction activities. For the purpose of
evaluating a design wave hindcasting from wind is necessary while for the operational purpose wave
forecasting in advance is needed. The underlying operations include ship routing, wave power
estimation, naval operations, recovery and rescue services, warnings to fishermen and coastal
communities, planning recreational activities, offshore drilling and diving management. Forecasting
of waves using numerical models although traditionally popular has high computational demands in
terms of time and effort and thus the resources required to be invested in numerical models may not

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250 Real time wave forecasting using wind
time history and genetic programming

be always justified (Goda, 2003, Altunkaynak, 2007). The data driven methods can instead be used
with advantage. The corresponding benefits of the latter are that they do not need exogenous data,
they are easy to develop, have small demand on computations and time and also they are easy to
re-calibrate. Since 1990’s wave rider buoys, deployed at several locations where ocean projects were
desired, became routine e.g. the U.S. National Data Buoy Program (NDBC, 2008)
(www.ndbc.noaa.gov, see also www.cnr.it; Doong et al., 2007) and the Data Buoy Program of
National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) of India (www.niot.res.in). The station specific
forecasts on real time or online basis and based on time series modeling principles were therefore
attempted (Deo et al., 1999, Charhate et al., 2008).
Real time forecasting of waves from wind using numerical methods is routinely practiced in
the U.S. (http://www.glo.state.tx.us/coastal/grants/cycle10/06-25_WavePredictionForecast/06-
025_FinalReport.pdf) and also in Italy and Australia. (Browne et al., 2007). Indian National Centre
for Ocean Information Service (INCOIS) at Hyderabad have been operating a real time wave
simulation and forecasting system based on certain software packages of numerical models. The
temporal and spatial information provided by the numerical models is attractive but the accuracy of
numerical forecasts may not be uniform (Kazeminezhad et al., 2005), and Browne et al., 2007).
Alternative modeling tools based on artificial neural networks are therefore explored for such an
application and further owing to the importance of nearby coastal or offshore facilities site-specific
models rather than those intended for large space and time intervals are developed. Kambekar and
Deo (2010, 2012) showed how the tool of genetic programming (GP) can be used for this purpose.
However these two works dealt with a few locations and over a short range of 24 hr, respectively.
This paper presents predictions at eight different locations around India over a period of 96 hr in
advance and also describes development of a graphical user interface to enable user-friendly access
to the forecasts so made through the internet to any registered user of the data collection and
dissemination authority.

2. THE DATABASE USED

The study involves the use of GP to carry out forecasting of the significant wave height (Hs) and
average wave period (Tz) using wind speed (U) and wind direction (θ) as input. Owing to
uncertainty and empirical nature of accounting fetch and duration related information the same is
not directly given as input here but indirectly considered through preceding sequence of wind speed
and wind direction respectively. Some of the previous studies (e.g. Deo et al., 2001) had shown
sufficiency of the input of wind speed alone in wave forecasting when ANNs were used. Similarly
the training process is assumed to account for swells coming from distant areas since it involves
relating the resultant or actual (sea and swell) significant wave height with wind speeds and
directions. Thus modeling of observed sequences of wind speed and corresponding directions is
assumed to be sufficient since it subsumes all unaccounted causal parameters. The data used in this
work was collected through wave rider buoys. The buoys are floating platforms moored to the bed;
and they carry sensors to measure various meteorological and oceanographic parameters. They
contain the global positioning system, beacon light and satellite transceiver and are powered by
batteries charged by solar panels. The sensors onboard measure the wind speed and direction,
atmospheric pressure, air temperature, relative humidity, conductivity, water temperature, surface
current speed and direction and wave parameters. (http://www.niot.res.in). Three-hourly
measurements of wind speed (U), wind direction (θ), significant wave height (Hs) and average
wave period (Tz) belonging to eight buoy stations: SW2, DS1, OB3, DS2, DS7, OB8, DS5, MB12
as shown in Figure 1 were considered. All these stations are in deep water. The sample size ranged
from 17 months at SW2 to 103 months at DS1. The performance of different techniques during
model training and testing was studied using the error measures of correlation coefficient (R), root
mean square error (RMSE) mean absolute error (MAE), coefficient of efficiency (CE) and scatter
index (SI).

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A.R. Kambekar and M.C. Deo 251

Figure 1. Location of wave buoys (http://www.niot.res.in/ndbp)

3. GENETIC PROGRAMMING
The concept of genetic programming is borrowed from the process of evolution in nature. In GP
populations of thousands of computer programs are genetically bred using the principle of survival
of the fittest. A genetic recombination or crossover operation is used for mating computer programs.
A good explanation of various concepts related to GP can be found in Koza (1992). Genetic
programming starts with an initial population of randomly generated computer programs composed
of functions and terminals appropriate to the problem domain. The functions may be arithmetic
operations, programming operations, mathematical functions, logical functions or domain specific
functions. As per the particular problem, the computer program may be either with Boolean valued
or integer, real, complex, vector, symbolic or multiple valued. The creation of the initial random
population is a blind random search of the search space of the problem. Each individual computer
program in the population is measured in terms of how well it performs in the particular problem
environment. This measure is called the fitness measure. The nature of the fitness measures varies
with the problem. In this study a variant of GP (program based) has been used, which operates
directly on machine code. The core code for GP used in this work is Discipulus (Francone, 2000) that
is based on an extension of the originally envisaged GP and called linear genetic programming
(LGP), which is highly efficient in GP implementation. (Brameier and Banzhaf, 2001, Foster, 2001).
Figure 2 shows five major requirements in a basic genetic programming which form human-supplied
input to the system. The computer program at the end is the output of the genetic programming
system.

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252 Real time wave forecasting using wind
time history and genetic programming

Terminal set

Function set
A Computer
GP Program
Fitness measure

Parameters

Termination
criteria and Results
Designation

Figure 2. Five major preparatory requirements for the basic genetic programming
(http://www.geneticprogramming.com/)

4. MODEL FORMULATION
Initially the objective was set at forecasting Hs and Tz for future time steps of 3, 6, 12, and 24 hr and
move to higher lead times if the approach was successful. The GP models were trained and tested for
unseen data. The performance of the GP model in forecasting Hs and Tz over these lead times from the
corresponding causative parameters of wind speed ‘U’ (at the current and preceding time steps) and
wind direction ‘θ’ (at the current and preceding time steps) was taken into account. The training and
testing data were separate and these included two third and one third segment from the start of the entire
available time history. The sample size for training was thus about 9 years at DS1, 4.5 years at DS2,
1.5 years at SW2, 2.5 years at MB12, 1.5 years at OB3, 2.5 years at OB8, 3 years at DS5, 1.5 years at
DS7 respectively. Both training and testing sets included monsoon and non monsoon conditions and
had comparable range of means, standard deviations and minimum and maximum values.
Selection of input in time series models can be done in a variety of ways and this includes evaluating
serial correlations and noticing the significant lag effect (Vos et al., 2005), saliency analysis
(Makarynskyy et al., 2004), cross-correlation statistics (Ho et al., 2006) and also by trials. Herein the
latter approach was adopted. The number of preceding wind speed and direction values was increased
one by one till it covered the entire 24 hour’s sequence, i.e. Ut-i for i = 0, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24.
It was seen from the forecasting results that the use of wind speeds and direction values of previous
24 hours were necessary and sufficient to capture the variations in their values satisfactorily and there
was no significant gain by moving further backward in time. Mathematically:
Hs(t+i) = f (Ut, U(t–3), U(t–6), U(t–9), U(t–12), U(t–15), U(t–18), U(t–21), U(t–24) ; θt, θ(t–3),
θ(t–6), θ(t–9), θ(t–12), θ(t–15), θ(t–18), θ(t–21), θ(t–24)) (1)
Tz(t+i) = Φ (Ut, U(t–3), U(t–6), U(t–9), U(t–12), U(t–15), U(t–18), U(t–21), U(t–24) ; θt, θ(t–3),
θ(t–6), θ(t–9), θ(t–12), θ(t–15), θ(t–18), θ(t–21), θ(t–24)) (2)
where;
Hs(t+i) = forecasted significant wave height at time (t + i)
t = given time instant;

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A.R. Kambekar and M.C. Deo 253

i = future time instants = 0, 3, 6, 12 and 24 hr

Tz(t+i) = forecasted average zero-cross wave period at time (t+i)
U = wind speed,
θ = wind direction as measured from North
The adopted approach should be highly useful in those cases where deployment of floating wave
rider buoys is too expensive in view of the high cost and maintenance requirements and where met
buoys measuring wind only (and not waves) instead can be deployed.
As an example the forecasting over 3 to 24 hr. ahead at station OB3 is given below. The station OB3
is located south west of Mangalore in deep water (1750 m) at a distance of 370 km from the west coast
of India in Arabian Sea. The measurements ranging from April 2004 to April 2005 were used for
calibration and those from April 2005 to September 2005 (monsoon) were used for testing. The
maximum Hs observed at OB3 was 6.48 m., its mean was 1.73 m and the standard deviation was 1.11 m.;
the same for the Tz was 10.58, 5.66 and 1.16 sec respectively. Table 1 show the performance of GP
for forecasting of Hs and Table 2 show the same for Tz over a lead time of 3, 6, 12, 24 hr. Figures 3
and 4 show the scatter and time series plots of observed vs. GP-forecasted Hs over the lead time of
3 and 24 hr. It can be seen from the error statistics realized that GP was able to forecast Hs satisfactorily
at this location. Similar to location DS1 the performance of GP was highly satisfactory in forecasting Hs
and Tz. The performance index of SI increased while R and CE decreased with lead time in both the
cases of Hs and Tz.
At the backdrop of success of the approach in forecasting Hs and Tz over a 24-hr horizon as above
the forecasting at still higher lead times was taken up subsequently. This involved forecasting over 1,
2, 3 and 4 day’s intervals in advance.
Mathematically the modeling approach can be written as:
Hs(t+i) = f (Ut, U(t–6), U(t–12), U(t–24), U(t–48), U(t–72), U(t–96); θt, θ(t-6), θ(t–12), θ(t–24),
θ(t–48), θ(t–72), θ(t–96)) (3)
Tz(t+i) = Φ (Ut, U(t–6), U(t–12), U(t–24), U(t–48), U(t–72), U(t–96); θt, θ(t–6), θ(t–12),
θ(t–24), θ(t–48), θ(t–72), θ(t–96)) (4)
where;
Hs(t+i) = forecasted significant wave height at time (t + i)
t = given time instant;
i = future time instants = 24, 48, 72 and 96 hr
Tz(t+i) = forecasted average zero-cross wave period at time (t+i)
U = wind speed,
θ = wind direction as measured from North

Table 1. Forecasting of Hs at OB3 with GP

Lead time (hr) R CE MAE (m) RMSE (m) S.I.
3 0.95 0.91 0.28 0.43 0.20
6 0.94 0.89 0.29 0.45 0.21
12 0.93 0.86 0.32 0.46 0.22
24 0.91 0.82 0.34 0.49 0.25

Table 2. Forecasting of Tz at OB3 with GP

Lead time (hr) R CE MAE (m) RMSE (m) S.I.
3 0.71 0.38 0.33 0.77 0.13
6 0.69 0.34 0.34 0.80 0.14
12 0.68 0.33 0.39 0.81 0.17
24 0.66 0.30 0.41 0.82 0.19

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254 Real time wave forecasting using wind
time history and genetic programming

8
(a) OB3-GP R = 0.95

Forecasted Hs (t+3) (m)

6

0
0 2 4 6 8
Observed Hs (m)

8
(b) OB3-GP R = 0.95 Observed Hs (m)
6 Forecasted Hs (t+3) (m)
Hs (m)

0
20.04.2005 05.09.2005
00:00 Time (hourly) 18:00

Figure 3. Observed vs. GP forecasted Hs(t+3) at OB3 (R = 0.95) (a) Scatter plot (b) Time
series plot

Figure 4. Observed vs. GP forecasted Hs(t+24) at OB3 (R = 0.91) Scatter plot (b) Time
series plot

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A.R. Kambekar and M.C. Deo 255

Forecasting of Hs and Tz over the lead time of 1, 2, 3 and 4 days as above were in agreement
with the observed values of Hs as seen in Tables 3 and 4. The high values of R, CE and low value
of MAE, RMSE and SI indicate a successful performance of selected forecasting approach and tool.
Typically the range of R in forecasting Hs varied from 0.92 at 1-day lead time to 0.86 at 4-day lead
time. Figure 5 exemplifies the same. The adopted models further performed satisfactorily in the
case of forecasting of Tz as well, although not as satisfactory as that of Hs. As can be seen from
Table 4, although the model did not perform as good as that of the earlier case of Hs, it still did well.
In order to employ the developed models for practical applications a Graphical User Interface (GUI)
was developed. Such GUI would enable any registered clientele of a data collection and dissemination
authority to access the simulated and forecasted values of Hs and Tz on real time or online basis at any

Table 3. Forecasting of Hs at OB3 with GP

Lead time (day) R CE MAE (m) RMSE (m) S.I.
1 0.92 0.80 0.24 0.49 0.23
2 0.89 0.75 0.29 0.56 0.26
3 0.87 0.73 0.30 0.57 0.27
4 0.86 0.72 0.31 0.59 0.30

Table 4. Forecasting of Tz at OB3 with GP

Lead time (day) R CE MAE (sec) RMSE (sec) S.I.
1 0.64 0.26 0.61 0.99 0.13
2 0.58 0.23 0.65 1.02 0.16
3 0.58 0.22 0.67 1.06 0.18
4 0.52 0.20 0.78 1.15 0.19

8
(a) OB3-GP R = 0.86
Forecasted Hs (t+96) (m)

0
0 2 4 6 8
Observed Hs (m)
8
(b) OB3-GP R = 0.86 Observed Hs (m)
6 Forecasted Hs (t+96) (m)
Hs (m)

0
19.04.2005 01.09.2005
00:00 Time (hourly) 15:00

Figure 5. Observed vs. GP forecasted Hs for lead time of 4 day at OB3 (R = 0.86) (a)
Scatter plot (b) Time series plot

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256 Real time wave forecasting using wind
time history and genetic programming

of the locations considered in this work. The computer programs evolved by GP in ‘C++’ language at
the concerned locations formed the basis for the development of this GUI. The GUI is based on Matlab
7.5 and Microsoft visual C++ 6.0.

5. OPERATION OF GUI
This section describes the development and operation of a GUI for forecasting waves from wind
parameters of ‘U’ and ‘θ’. The GUI is suitable for web based online forecasting at the selected buoy
locations in Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean. Following procedure can be followed to
operate the GUI for wave simulation:
(a) Open the Matlab window and set the “current directory” to simulation folder and type codeword,
say, “JaiHind” in the command window for simulation and typically “JaiHind1” for forecasting.
(b) The map of India (Figure 6) with the eight buoy locations in Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean and
Bay of Bengal will appear on the screen.
(c) Click on the desired station where the simulation of Hs and Tz is aimed at and then click “load”
button. The GUI window to load input parameters for simulation will appear.
(d) The next operation is to execute the “.exe” files where input has to be given in the GUI window
to execute the ‘C’ program for wave simulation. The GP model developed is based on the
9 input pairs of 3-hourly wind speed and wind direction of previous 24 hours and hence the
number of inputs = 18. (This step is for software running in off-line mode and its execution is
shown in Figure 7).
(e) The forecasted values of Hs and Tz will be displayed on the screen (Figure 8). The model
output will be saved in the text file. (Step ‘a’ to ‘e’ are in the offline mode).
(f) The same procedure is to be repeated for obtaining simulation of Hs and Tz at any other buoy
location i.e. DS1, SW2, OB3, DS2, DS7, OB8, DS5 and MB12.
Similar to the above GUI enabling the forecast for the time horizon of 24 hr, a separate one for
forecasting Hs and Tz for lead times of multiple days –1 to 4 days- was also developed. Figure 9 shows
the forecasted Hs and Tz for time horizons of 1 to 4 days.

Figure 6. Map of India showing buoy locations for online forecasting

International Journal of Ocean and Climate Systems

A.R. Kambekar and M.C. Deo 257

Figure 7. GUI window after execution of the ‘C’ program for forecasting at DS1

Figure 8. GUI window displaying forecasted Hs and Tz at DS1 for 3 to 24 hrs

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258 Real time wave forecasting using wind
time history and genetic programming

Figure 9. GUI window displaying forecasted Hs and Tz at DS1 for 1 to 4 days

6. CONCLUSIONS
• Genetic programming based time series forecasting models were developed at eight locations
around the Indian coastline to obtain forecasts of significant wave height and average wave
period over time horizons of 1 hr to 96 hr based only on wind measurements.
• Due to varying time scales separate models were found necessary to forecast up to 24 hr and
beyond it.
• The testing of the developed models using a variety of error statistics confirmed satisfactory
performance of the GP based formulations.
• A graphical user interface was developed to integrate the models calibrated for individual
stations into a single platform. It will enable a user-friendly access to the forecasts through the
internet to any registered user of the data collection and dissemination authority.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The data used in this work were collected by NIOT, Chennai. Authors thank Dr G. Latha, NIOT, for
the fruitful technical discussions.

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www.cnr.it
http://www.glo.state.tx.us/coastal
www.incois.gov.in
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov
http://www.niot.res.in

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