The Prediction of Oceanic Mesoscale Eddy Properties and Propagation Trajectories Based on Machine Learning

Abstract

Mesoscale eddies play an important role in ocean circulation, material energy exchange and variation of ocean environments. Machine learning methods can efficiently process massive amounts of data and automatically learn the implicit features, thus providing a new approach to eddy prediction research. Using the mesoscale eddy trajectory data derived from multimission satellite altimetry, we propose relevant machine learning models based on long short-term memory network (LSTM) and the extra trees (ET) algorithm for the prediction of eddy properties and propagation trajectories. Characteristic factors, including attribute features and past eddy displacements, were exploited to construct prediction models with high effectiveness and few predictors. To study their effects at different forecasting times, we separately trained the models by rebuilding the corresponding relationship between eddy samples and labels. In addition, the variation characteristics and the predictability of eddy properties and propagation trajectories were discussed from the prediction results. Cross-validation shows that at different prediction times, our method is superior to previous methods in terms of the mean absolute error (MAE) of eddy properties and the root mean square error (RMSE) of propagation. The stable variation in eddy properties makes the prediction more dependent on the historical time series than that of a propagation forecast. The short-term propagation prediction of eddies contained more noise than long-term predictions, and the long-term predictions revealed a more significant trend. Finally, we discuss the effect of eddy properties on the prediction ability of the eddy propagation trajectory.