CLTS-Net: A More Accurate and Universal Method for the Long-Term Prediction of Significant Wave Height

Abstract

Significant wave height (SWH) prediction plays an important role in marine engineering areas such as fishery, exploration, power generation, and ocean transportation. For long-term forecasting of a specific location, classical numerical model wave height forecasting methods often require detailed climatic data and incur considerable calculation costs, which are often impractical in emergencies. In addition, how to capture and use the dynamic correlation between multiple variables is also a major research challenge for multivariate SWH prediction. To explore a new method for predicting SWH, this paper proposes a deep neural network model for multivariate time series SWH prediction—namely, CLTS-Net. In this study, the sea surface wind and wave height in the ERA5 dataset of the relevant points P1, P2, and P3 from 2011 to 2018 were used as input information to train the model and evaluate the model’s SWH prediction performance. The results show that the correlation coefficients (R) of CLTS-Net are 0.99 and 0.99, respectively, in the 24 h and 48 h SWH forecasts at point P1 along the coast. Compared with the current mainstream artificial intelligence-based SWH solutions, it is much higher than ANN (0.79, 0.70), RNN (0.82, 0.83), LSTM (0.93, 0.91), and Bi-LSTM (0.95, 0.94). Point P3 is located in the deep sea. In the 24 h and 48 h SWH forecasts, the R of CLTS-Net is 0.97 and 0.98, respectively, which are much higher than ANN (0.71, 0.72), RNN (0.85, 0.78), LSTM (0.85, 0.78), and Bi-LSTM (0.93, 0.93). Especially in the 72 h SWH forecast, when other methods have too large errors and have lost their practical application value, the R of CLTS-Net at P1, P2, and P3 can still reach 0.81, 0.71, and 0.98. The results also show that CLTS-Net can capture the short-term and long-term dependencies of data, so as to accurately predict long-term SWH, and has wide applicability in different sea areas.

Significant wave height prediction based on deep learning in the South China Sea

“…In recent years, due to abnormal climate change, sea wave disasters have occurred frequently in coastal cities in the South China Sea, seriously threatening the safety of life and property of people in coastal cities. Therefore, accurate SWH prediction can effectively improve the safety of marine activities and reduce the occurrence of marine accidents, which is of great significance to the development of national security and the marine economy (Wang and Oey, 2008;Young and Ribal, 2019;Fan et al, 2020;Gao et al, 2021b;Li et al, 2021).…”