Time Series Analysis of Evaporation Duct Height over South China Sea: A Stochastic Modeling Approach

Abstract

The evaporation duct could significantly affect the work status of maritime microwave communication systems in the South China Sea. Therefore, the exact forecasting of the evaporation duct is vital for the normal operation of the systems. This study presents a stochastic modeling approach to predict the future trends of the evaporation duct over the South China Sea. The autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model has been used for modeling the monthly evaporation duct height estimated from the Climate Forecast System Reanalysis dataset released by the National Centers for Environment Prediction. The long-term evaporation duct height data were collected for a period of 10 years from 2008 to 2017. The analysis of correlation function reveals the existence of seasonality in the time series. Therefore, a seasonal ARIMA model with the form as ARIMA (0,0,1) × (0,1,2)12 is proposed by fitting the monthly data optimally. The fitted model is further used to forecast the evaporation duct variation for the year 2018 at 95% level of confidence, and high-accuracy results are obtained. Our study demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed stochastic modeling technique to predict the future variations of the evaporation duct over South China Sea.

Keywords

• evaporation duct height
• stochastic modeling
• seasonality
• forecasting
• ARIMA