A Novel Dual Path Gated Recurrent Unit Model for Sea Surface Salinity Prediction

Accurate and real-time sea surface salinity (SSS) prediction is an elemental part of marine environmental monitoring. It is believed that the intrinsic correlation and patterns of historical SSS data can improve prediction accuracy, but they have been not fully considered in statistical methods. In recent years, deep-learning methods have been successfully applied for time series prediction and achieved excellent results by mining intrinsic correlation of time series data. In this work, we propose a dual path gated recurrent unit (GRU) network (DPG) to address the SSS prediction accuracy challenge. Specifically, DPG uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract the overall long-term pattern of time series, and then a recurrent neural network (RNN) is used to track the local short-term pattern of time series. The CNN module is composed of a 1D CNN without pooling, and the RNN part is composed of two parallel but different GRU layers. Experiments conducted on the South China Sea SSS dataset from the Reanalysis Dataset of the South China Sea (REDOS) show the feasibility and effectiveness of DPG in predicting SSS values. It achieved accuracies of 99.29%, 98.44%, and 96.85% in predicting the coming 1, 5, and 14 days, respectively. As well, DPG achieves better performance on prediction accuracy and stability than autoregressive integrated moving averages, support vector regression, and artificial neural networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that data intrinsic correlation has been applied to predict SSS values.