An Adaptive Scale Sea Surface Temperature Predicting Method Based on Deep Learning With Attention Mechanism

Sea surface temperature (SST) prediction plays an important role in ocean-related fields. It is challenging due to the nonlinear temporal dynamics with changing complex factors and the inherent difficulties in long-scale predictions. Conventional models often lack efficient information extraction and cannot meet the requirements of long-scale predictions. Therefore, the gate recurrent unit (GRU) encoder–decoder with SST codes and dynamic influence link (DIL), GRU encoder–decoder (GED), which considered both the static and dynamic influence, is proposed in this letter. Each SST code, capturing the static information more effectively, was computed by all hidden states of the encoder and was individually associated with each predicted SST. The DIL, capturing the dynamic influence, connected the SST code with the early predicted future SST for solving the long-scale dependence problem. GED was tested on the Bohai Sea SST data sets and South China Sea SST data sets and compared with full-connected long-short term memory (FC-LSTM) and support vector regression. The results demonstrated that GED outperformed others on different prediction scales and different prediction terms (daily, weekly, and monthly), especially in terms of long-scale and long-term predictions. In addition, attention relationships between historical and future SSTs were further explored, and there was a meaningful finding that each future daily mean SST of Bohai Sea most strongly correlated with the past 27th to 29th historical values.