Short and mid-term sea surface temperature prediction using time-series satellite data and LSTM-AdaBoost combination approach

Abstract

Sea surface temperature (SST) is one of the most important parameters in the global ocean-atmospheric system, changes of which can have profound effects on the global climate and may lead to extreme weather events such as droughts and floods. Therefore, predicting the dynamics of future SSTs is of vital importance which can help identify these extreme events and alleviate the losses they cause. In this paper, a machine learning method combining the long short-term memory (LSTM) deep recurrent neural network model and the AdaBoost ensemble learning model (LSTM-AdaBoost) is proposed to predict the short and mid-term daily SST considering that LSTM is good at modelling long-term dependencies but suffers from overfitting, while AdaBoost has strong prediction capability and is not easily overfitted. By combining these two strong and heterogeneous models, the prediction errors related to variance may cancel out each other and the final results can be improved. In this method, the historical time-series satellite data of SST anomaly (SSTA) is used instead of SST itself considering that the fluctuations of SSTs are very small compared to their absolute magnitudes. The seasonality of the SSTA time series is first modelled using polynomial regression and then removed. Then, the deseasonalized time series are used to train the developed LSTM model and AdaBoost model independently. Daily SSTA predictions are made using these two models, and eventually, their predictions are combined as final predictions using the averaging strategy. A case study in the East China Sea that predicts the daily SSTA 10 days ahead shows that the proposed LSTM-AdaBoost combination model outperforms the LSTM and AdaBoost separately, as well as the optimized support vector regression (SVR) model, the optimized feedforward backpropagation neural network model (BPNN), and the stacking LSTM-AdaBoost model (S_LSTM-AdaBoost), when judged using multiple error statistics and from different perspectives. The results suggest that the LSTM-AdaBoost combination model using the averaging strategy is highly promising for short and mid-term daily SST predictions.