Predicting the occurrence of sand banks in the North Sea

Sand banks have a wavelength between 1 and 10 km, and they are up to several tens of meters high. Also, sand banks may have an impact on large-scale human activities that take place in the North Sea like sand mining, shipping, offshore wind farms, etc. Therefore, it is important to know where sand banks occur and what their natural behavior is. Here, we use an idealized model to predict the occurrence of sand banks in the North Sea. The aim of the paper is to research to what extent the model is able to predict the occurrence of sand banks in the North Sea. We apply a sensitivity analysis to optimize the model results for a North Sea environment. The results show that the model correctly predicts whether or not sand banks occur for two thirds of the North Sea area.