CHLfuzzy: a spreadsheet tool for the fuzzy modeling of chlorophyll concentrations in coastal lagoons

Abstract

CHLFuzzy is a user-friendly, flexible, multiple-input single-output Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy rule based model developed in a MS-Excel (R) spreadsheet environment. The model receives a raw dataset consisting of four predictor variables, e.g., water temperature, dissolved oxygen content, dissolved inorganic nitrogen concentration, and solar radiation levels. It then defines fuzzy sets according to a collection of fuzzy membership functions, allowing for the establishment of fuzzy 'if-then' rules, and predicts chlorophyll-a concentrations, which highly compare to the measured ones. The performance of the model was tested against the Adaptive Neural Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), showing satisfactory results. An extensive dataset of environmental observations in Vassova Lagoon (Northern Greece), during the years 2001-2002, was used to train the model and an independent dataset collected during 2004 was used to validate CHLFuzzy and ANFIS models. Although both models showed a similar performance on the training dataset, with quite satisfactory agreement between observed and modeled chlorophyll-a values, the best results were obtained using the CHLfuzzy model. Similarly, the CHLfuzzy model depicted a fairly good ability to hindcast chlorophyll-a concentrations for the verification dataset, thus improving ANFIS model forecasts. Overall results suggest that CHLfuzzy can potentially be used as a lagoon water quality forecasting tool requiring limited computational cost.