Dynamic graphs attention for ocean variable forecasting

Forecasting the ocean dynamics is a critical issue for a wide array of climate extremes and environmental crisis. The dynamic variations are traditionally approached by relying on numerical models with all the related physical processes identified beforehand. An efficient alternative forecasting approach is based on the data-driven models. Despite their potential ability in modeling spatio-temporal ocean data, they ignore the fact that the ocean variables in different spatial regions and time periods typically have ever changing influences on each other, thus cannot yield satisfactory prediction results. In this paper, we develop a novel attention based dynamic graph for the ocean variable forecasting problem, which captures both the spatial and temporal dependencies. Specifically, we employ joint self-attention to incorporate information from the spatial graph over the target region, and model the graph evolution across long-range time steps. The performance of the proposed prediction model has been examined in the Indian Ocean based on ocean grid data products datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that this model has significant forecasting capability within 12 months, compared with the numerical methods and the state-of-the-art spatio-temporal embedding baselines.