Forecasting sea surface temperature during typhoon events in the Bohai Sea using spatiotemporal neural networks

Advanced neural network methods can effectively combine temporal and spatial information, allowing us to exploit complex relationships in the prediction of sea surface temperature (SST). Therefore, the authors have developed an attention-based context fusion network model recently, known as ACFN, to enhance the underlying spatiotemporal correlations in SST data. In a previous preliminary long-term evaluation, ACFN has demonstrated substantial improvements over several state-of-the-art baseline models, such as Convolutional Long-Short Term Memory (ConvLSTM) and Predictive Recurrent Neural Network (PredRNN). However, these methods have not been widely used for predicting SST during typhoons, and their performance has not been thoroughly evaluated. This study focuses on three specific typhoons, In-fa (2021), Lekima (2019), and Rumbia (2018), as case studies. The results show that ACFN consistently outperforms ConvLSTM and PredRNN, as demonstrated during Typhoon In-fa with a mean absolute error of 0.27 °C and a root-mean-square error of 0.33 °C for a 1-day forecast time. This study also examines the impact of forecast time on predictive skill, revealing that the performance of ACFN, as expected, gradually decreases with longer forecast times. This thorough evaluation of the ACFN model provides a valuable reference for using deep learning in predicting regional typhoon SST. Plain language summary: In previous work, we developed an attention-based context fusion network model. This spatiotemporal neural network model has been successfully applied to short-term sea surface temperature (SST) prediction in the Bohai Sea, utilizing only current and previous 1- to 10-day SST data as input to forecast SST for the subsequent 1- to 10-day period. In this study, we further evaluated the capability of the model to predict SST during typhoons in the Bohai Sea, and the results were very promising. When predicting SST during Typhoon In-fa, the present spatiotemporal neural network model had a mean absolute error of only 0.27 °C for a 1-day forecast time, and a correlation coefficient of 0.74. On the other hand, comparison with baseline spatiotemporal neural network models shows that the present model is more effective in extracting input information. The current model has resolved the constraint that its predictive capability does not diminish as the forecast time increases, thereby enhancing the rationality of the prediction outcomes. In conclusion, the present spatiotemporal neural network model demonstrates its efficacy in forecasting typhoon-induced SST in the Bohai Sea, offering valuable insights for applications in meteorology and oceanography.