Simulation and modeling of elevation variations of radial sand banks in Jiangsu province based on spatio-temporal correlation analysis

Jiangsu province, which has vast population and limited land, is facing with land resources shortage. However, the offshore radial sand banks provide huge potential land reserve resources. But, epeirogenic movement and the variation of elevation of the radial sand banks are quite frequent in coastal area of Jiangsu province; Hence, mastering law of the variation of elevation of the radial sand banks is the precondition of making use of the radial sand banks scientifically. This paper has used remote sensing method to build a series of DEMs of radial sand banks which has constant temporal intervals, and then simulated the variations of elevation of sand banks by using these DEMs. For non-spatial data, the variation law of phenomena can be revealed by time series models. However, for spatial data such as the sand bank elevation, due to the existence of spatial dependence, goes against the hypothesis that the data is independent of each other in classic statistical analysis. That means, the elevation of a point on sand bank not only dependents on its own historical values, but also affected by its neighbors. Therefore, with comprehensive consideration of time and space, we build a forecasting model based on spatio-temporal relation analysis to simulate the elevation variations of radial sands banks. Then verify the result by using the elevation in the next time interval. Results show that this method which this paper proposed can satisfy the requirement of mesoscale applications.