Detection of Bering Sea Slope Mesoscale Eddies Derived from Satellite Altimetry Data by an Attention Network

Abstract

In the Bering Sea slope, ocean eddies are essential physical processes that carry nutrients to the shelf. The development of the satellite altimeter has facilitated the observation of oceanic eddies. Attention networks are used as the core algorithm for eddy detection to suppress feature responses in irrelevant non-eddy areas, which can address the issue of sample imbalance in high-latitude ocean eddies. Furthermore, data from both the sea surface height (SSH) and geostrophic velocity were employed as model inputs to integrate more eddy-related properties. The results of ocean eddy detection using this method and the dataset allowed more eddies to be detected than with traditional vector geometry-based methods and only SSH-based models. This study also incorporated the results of multiple deep learning models to increase both the overall and single-day eddy detection efficiency. As a result, the algorithms in this paper show that attention networks and geostrophic velocity data are both appropriate for high-latitude ocean eddy identification. This makes a contribution to the further application of deep learning methods to satellite altimetry data.