A CFCC-LSTM Model for Sea Surface Temperature Prediction

Sea surface temperature (SST) prediction is not only theoretically important but also has a number of practical applications across a variety of ocean-related fields. Although a large amount of SST data obtained via remote sensor are available, previous work rarely attempted to predict future SST values from history data in spatiotemporal perspective. This letter regards SST prediction as a sequence prediction problem and builds an end-to-end trainable long short term memory (LSTM) neural network model. LSTM naturally has the ability to learn the temporal relationship of time series data. Besides temporal information, spatial information is also included in our LSTM model. The local correlation and global coherence of each pixel can be expressed and retained by patches with fixed dimensions. The proposed model essentially combines the temporal and spatial information to predict future SST values. Its structure includes one fully connected LSTM layer and one convolution layer. Experimental results on two data sets, i.e., one Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer SST data set covering China Coastal waters and one National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration High-Resolution SST data set covering the Bohai Sea, confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed model.