Monitoring of Underwater Sediment Plumes Using Clustering Techniques

Low density water from saltwater ocean with greater concentrations of suspended particles from mining operation move towards coastal areas and shelves of land, results in sediment plumes deposition. When suspended sediment and plume water combine, they can cause coastal sedimentation, contaminate the sea water and hazardous the living organism in ocean. Therefore, in order to improve the maintenance of the coastal environment, it is imperative to comprehend the changing behaviour of debris plumes under the effect of various forcings. Data has been collected using scaled mining vehicle Apollo II of Royal IHC from 300 m water depth, information including turbidity, the level of suspended sediment, water's temperature, and sediment plumes dataset includes total samples 2866 and 17 features. In order to determine the optimal clustering strategy for plume sediment monitoring, this study primarily focuses on monitoring the sediment plume throughout a geographic region utilising clustering strategies including <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$K$</tex> means clustering, Hierarchical clustering, and Gaussian Mixture model.