Comparison and Analysis of Detection Methods for Typhoon-Storm Surges Based on Tide-Gauge Data—Taking Coasts of China as Examples

Abstract

Global warming is predicted to lead to a new geographic and spatial distribution of storm-surge events and an increase in their activity intensity. Therefore, it is necessary to detect storm-surge events in order to reveal temporal and spatial variations in their activity intensity. This study attempted to detect storm-surge events from the perspective of detecting outliers. Four common outlier-detection methods, the Pauta criterion (PC), Chauvenet criterion (CC), Pareto distribution (PD) and kurtosis coefficient (KC), were used to detect the storm-surge events from the hourly residual water level data of 14 tide gauges along the coasts of China. This paper evaluates the comprehensive ability of the four methods to detect storm-surge events by combining historical typhoon-storm-surge events and deep-learning target-detection-evaluation indicators. The results indicate that (1) all of the four methods are feasible for detecting storm surge events; (2) the PC has the highest comprehensive detection ability for storm-surge events (F1 = 0.66), making it the most suitable for typhoon-storm-surge detection in coastal areas of China; the CC has the highest detection accuracy for typhoon-storm-surge events (precision = 0.89), although the recall of the CC is the lowest (recall = 0.42), as only severe storm surges were detected. This paper therefore evaluates four storm-surge-detection methods in coastal areas of China and provides a basis for the evaluation of storm-surge-detection methods and detection algorithms.