A Data-Driven Deep Learning Model for Weekly Sea Ice Concentration Prediction of the Pan-Arctic During the Melting Season

This study proposes a purely data-driven model for the weekly prediction of daily sea ice concentration (SIC) of the pan-Arctic (90 N, 45 N, 180 E, 180 W) during the melting season. The model, SICNet, adopts an encoder–decoder framework with fully convolutional networks (FCNs) and can predict the SIC (covering
$320\times224$
grids, each with a resolution of 25 km) one-week lead with high accuracy. We design a temporal–spatial attention module (TSAM) to help SICNet capture spatiotemporal dependencies from SIC sequences. The satellite-derived SIC data of 33 years (1988–2020) from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) are employed to train and test the model, 1988–2015 for training, and 2016–2020 for testing. SICNet achieves the mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.67%, the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 8.67%, and the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) of 0.9784 in weekly predicting of SIC during the melting season. SICNet achieves better performance than existing deep-learning-based models. The TSAM reduced the MAE from 2.73% to 2.67%. We evaluate the model’s performance by recursively predicting, from seven- to 28-day leads. We employ the binary accuracy (BACC) metric to measure the accuracy of the predicted sea ice extent (SIE) and compare SICNet with the anomaly persistence (Persist). SICNet shows better performance than Persist with an average BACC on the 28th day of 2016–2019 over 90% (90.17%). For the 28-day lead predictions of three extreme minimum SIE in September 2007, 2012, and 2020, SICNet outperforms Persist with an average improvement of 1.84% in BACC and
$0.16 milkm^{2}$
in the SIE error.