UniOcean: A Unified Framework for Predicting Multiple Ocean Factors of Varying Temporal Scales

Accurate prediction of ocean factors (e.g., temperature and salinity) is crucial for plenty of applications, including weather forecasting, storm tracking, and ecosystem protection. Meanwhile, it is well-known that the ocean is a unified system and various ocean factors usually influence each other. For example, the changes in temperature would affect the distribution of salinity in ocean. However, the existing studies for ocean factor prediction mainly focus on designing individual models for predicting specific factors and ignore the correlations between different factors, thus having potentials to be further improved. Therefore, we propose a unified framework UniOcean to predict multiple ocean factors simultaneously, and capture the correlations between them to improve the prediction accuracy. First, considering that ocean factors are usually collected with different temporal scales, we develop the fine-grained multiscale data fusion module to integrate multiple ocean factors with different temporal scales, and effectively learn their hierarchical patterns at different levels. Then, since the correlations between ocean factors may vary across different time periods, the multifactor correlation learning module is constructed to adaptively learn the dynamic correlations between different factors. Finally, we utilize the factor-specific towers to predict multiple ocean factors simultaneously. Experimental results on five real-world remote sensing datasets demonstrate that UniOcean significantly improves the prediction accuracy by 11%–53% in terms of MSD for different ocean factors.