Sea Surface Height Prediction With Deep Learning Based on Attention Mechanism

Sea surface height (SSH) prediction is theoretically and practically significant for global and regional ocean-related research. Numerous studies have been conducted to acquire accurate prediction results. However, most investigations on SSH ignore the importance of data at each time step on the prediction, which limits the accuracy of the final prediction. Therefore, a deep learning model combined Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network and Attention mechanism is proposed in this letter. This model integrates attention mechanism in both of time and space dimensions into LSTM. For time dimension, it assigns reasonable weight for data at each time step. For space dimension, it groups the data points close to each other, let model concentrate on points in the same group and eliminates the impact from other points. Daily absolute dynamic topography (ADT) in the South China Sea from January 2010 to December 2017 is adopted to conduct experiments. The proposed model demonstrates reliable results, the root mean square error is 0.38 cm, the mean absolute error is 0.0031, and the correlation coefficient reaches up to 0.999. The results show that the deep learning method based on attention mechanism is reliable for SSH prediction with high performance.