Sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTAs) and sea surface height anomalies (SSHAs) are indispensable parts of scientific research, such as mesoscale eddy, current, ocean-atmosphere interaction and so on. Nowadays, extended-range predictions of ocean dynamics, especially in SSTA and SSHA, can provide daily prediction services in the range of 30 days, which bridges the gap between synoptic-scale weather forecasts and monthly average scale climate predictions. However, the forecast efficiency of extended range remains problematic. With the development of ocean reanalysis and satellite remote sensing products, large amounts datasets provide an unprecedented opportunity to use big data for the extended range prediction of ocean dynamics. In this study, a hybrid model, combing convolutional neural network (CNN) model with transfer learning (TL), was established to predict SSTA and SSHA at monthly scales, which makes full use of these data resources that arise from delayed gridding reanalysis products and real-time satellite remote sensing observations. The proposed model, where both ocean and atmosphere reanalysis datasets serve as the pretraining dataset and the satellite remote sensing observations are employed for fine-tuning based on the transfer learning (TL) method, can effectively capture the evolving spatial characteristics of SSTAs and SSHAs with low prediction errors over the 30 days range. When the forecast lead time is 30 days, the root means square errors for the SSTAs and SSHAs model results are 0.32°C and 0.027 m in the South China Sea, respectively, indicating that this model has not only satisfactory prediction performance but also offers great potential for practical operational applications in improving the skill of extended-range predictions.

The sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTA) plays a key role in climate change and extreme weather processes. Usually, SSTA forecast methods consist of numerical and conventional statistical models, the former can be seriously influenced by the uncertainty of physical parameterization schemes, the nonlinearity of ocean dynamic processes, and the nonrobustness of numerical discretization algorithms. Recently, deep learning has been explored to address forecast issues in the field of oceanography. However, existing deep learning models for ocean forecasting are mainly site-specific, which were designed for forecasting on a single point or for an independent variable. Moreover, few special deep learning networks have been developed to deal with SSTA field forecasts under typhoon conditions. In this study, a multivariable convolutional neural network (MCNN) is proposed, which can be applied for synoptic-scale SSTA forecasting in the South China Sea. In addition to the SSTA itself, the surface wind speed and the surface current velocity are regarded as input variables for the prediction networks, effectively reflecting the influences of both local atmospheric dynamic forcing and nonlocal oceanic thermal advection. Experimental results demonstrate that MCNN exhibits better performance than single-variable convolutional neural network (SCNN), especially for the SSTA forecast during the typhoon passage. While forecast results deteriorate rapidly in the SCNN during the passage of a typhoon, forecast errors in the MCNN can be effectively restrained to slowly increase over the forecast time due to the introduction of the surface wind speed in this network.