3. Discussion

Because water exchange between lagoonal estuaries and the open ocean can be relatively restricted, there is a relatively high potential in systems like PS for changes in precipitation patterns and storm frequencies associated with global climate change to result in changes in salinity patterns and subsequent ecosystem alterations. Changes in precipitation will affect the amount and timing of river flow, which will impact nutrient cycling, estuarine flushing rates, and salinity. Increased storm activity may open new inlets, which would alter current flow, increase tidal action, and allow a greater influx of seawater that carries with it both different chemical signals and mobile species. Salinity is therefore a practical estuarine characteristic to use to study the impacts of these changes, as both effects mentioned above include enhanced water exchange that impacts overall estuarine salinity content [43, 44].

We developed and evaluated two statistical models, using the best model to hindcast salinity in PS. The process mean function combined with the exponential covariance with a nugget explained 89% of the variability in a test dataset with a RMSE of 2.0 and produced relatively accurate retrospective salinity maps under a wide range of freshwater influx and system-state scenarios. Much of this accuracy was due to allowing the range and partial sill parameters of the spatial covariance to be time-period specific. We then examined variations in the spatial distribution of salinity under varying freshwater influx (FWI) conditions such as drought, average FWI, and flood conditions, and identified the following patterns. In years with moderate FWI, the salinity gradient increased from west to east in PS as expected, and was highest adjacent to the major inlets, with highest salinities near Oregon Inlet. In years with low FWI indicative of drought conditions, the overall mean and variance in salinity increased in PS. In years with floods, salinities displayed a high degree of spatial variation, with salinities being lower near the tributaries as expected, yet also displaying occasional sharp increases in salinity near inlets due to influx of ocean water into PS via the major inlets.

effects of FWI over a longer duration than 61 days. Doing so might explain differences in salinity patterns seen in time periods with similar one-week and twomonth FWI conditions. Molina [45] calculated an 11 month mean residence time for freshwater in PS. We could incorporate this effect by adding a third freshwater influx index to the mean function or by adding an autoregressive component to the model so that salinity in a given time period was a function of mean salinity in the previous time period. The first option would be tedious from a data-manipulation standpoint, but much easier from a mathematical model-fitting standpoint, because SAS® Proc Mixed could still be used. The second option necessitates a change in the covariance function, as we can no longer assume that salinity deviations from the mean function at a given space-time point were independent in time. This second option would also require specialized hand-written code, as no current SAS® Proc

Differences in salinity patterns between June 1999 and June 2002, our two lowto-low FWI time periods, could be attributed to differences in FWI from the Roanoke River, one of the two northern rivers whose connection to PS is indirect. This observation warrants further investigation into the calculation of the FWII indices; namely, an investigation of water-path distance as a possible substitute for crowflies distance between river gauges and sites in PS. Although we did not find a study that demonstrated marked predictive improvement using water-path distance under all circumstances ([36, 46], and others), it would be interesting in future work to compare differences in PS salinity predictions using both distance methods. Recall that Gardner et al. [34] noted more accurate predictions of stream temperatures when models incorporated water-path distance, but only when this distance was further modified and weighted by stream order. It might be the case that waterpath distance out-performs crow-flies distance in predicting estuarine salinity when care is taken to make all explanatory variables as meaningful as possible. Development of an automated procedure for calculating water-path distances similar to the one used in [47] would make such an investigation more practically feasible.

Covariance function. Two mutually-exclusive improvements to the covariance function, as implemented in SAS® Proc Mixed, could be investigated: using either the Matern covariance function or an anisotropic covariance function to achieve greater flexibility in each time period. The Matern covariance function has a smoothing parameter in addition to partial sill and range parameters. When the smoothing parameter takes the value of 0.5, the Matern covariance function is the same as the exponential covariance function—as the smoothness parameter approaches infinity, the covariance function approaches the Gaussian covariance function. Using the Matern covariance function is thus equivalent to allowing a third parameter to determine which two-parameter covariance function is appropriate, as opposed to using the same two-parameter covariance function for every time period. The computational cost of this flexibility is high—in a similar model with only four separate groups of covariance parameters, compared to the 40 groups in this paper—co-author Amy Nail experienced computation time of 2 h (versus a 2 min run time using the two-parameter exponential covariance function here). The added computational burden is due to the complex nature of the Matern covariance function and to the necessity of estimating one additional covariance

parameter per time period (for a total of 40 additional parameters).

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than would two points separated by a west-to-east vector of the same length.

Another way to achieve flexibility while still specifying a single covariance function for every time period, would be to allow an anisotropic covariance function. Geometric anisotropy allows for different range parameters in different directions. For example, if the water current in PS were flowing directly north-to-south, two points separated by a north-to-south vector might have more similar values of salinity

allows such a dynamic space-time model to be fit.

Process-Based Statistical Models Predict Dynamic Estuarine Salinity

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.89911

## 3.1 Improvements to model predictions

For retrospective prediction purposes, model improvements could focus on improvements to the mean trend, the covariance, or both, and such improvements could be evaluated using the test dataset. A reasonable goal might be to increase R<sup>2</sup> to 0.93 or to reduce RMSE to 1.5. Improvements for the purpose of prospective prediction of salinity under hypothetical, unobserved conditions, a situation in which spatial covariance among observation deviations cannot be used, would entail improving the mean function exclusively. Locations and time periods with high SEs highlight conditions not well-represented by the current mean function. A reasonable goal here would be to produce a model for which all values of SE fall beneath the current median (1.32).

Mean function. The mean function alone explained over two-thirds of the variability in salinity in both process and time models. While this is a noteworthy accomplishment, there remains room for multiple improvements. High SE values in Figure 5A show that the mean function is unable to capture the interaction between high FWI in September 1999 and hurricane storm surges. One hurricane explanatory variable, inverse\_days\_surveyt, remained in the final process model. Its parameter estimate was positive, reflecting that strong hurricane winds push more saltwater into PS through inlets than would enter under typical seasonal wind conditions, but alone it explained only 4% of salinity variability in the full dataset. The inverse\_days\_surveyt, variable did not differentiate between a year in which a single hurricane passed within 12 days of the survey and a year in which such a hurricane followed another that passed 12 days earlier. A future effort might attempt to account for cumulative build-up of storm surge on observed PS salinities.

Though closest\_inlet\_distit alone explained a third of the variability in salinity over all time periods, variability in inlet-plume size across Figures 3–5 suggests that this distance metric should be modified based on wind speed and direction, using more finely resolved wind information than the montht variable. Devising a way to use the u and v components of wind to interact with closest\_inlet\_distit could allow both the size and the direction of the inlet plume to vary such that east-to-west winds create different plume sizes and shapes than winds from the southeast-tonorthwest. Considerable exploratory analysis would be needed to determine what pre-survey time lag should be considered to affect observed survey salinities.

Differences in both salinity values and SE estimates between early-stage drought during June 1999 and late-stage drought during June 2002 suggest accounting for
