Spatial-temporal transformer network for multi-year ENSO prediction

Dan Song, Xinqi Su, Wenhui Li, Zhengya Sun, Tongwei Ren, Wen Liu, Anan Liu

Frontiers in Marine Science · 13 March 2023

In one sentence. A spatio-temporal transformer with recurrent multi-step prediction uses SST and heat content anomalies to forecast ENSO 18 months ahead.

Abstract

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a quasi-periodic climate type that occurs near the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Extreme periods of this climate type can cause terrible weather and climate anomalies on a global scale. Therefore, it is critical to accurately, quickly, and effectively predict the occurrence of ENSO events. Most existing research methods rely on the powerful data-fitting capability of deep learning which does not fully consider the spatio-temporal evolution of ENSO and its quasi-periodic character, resulting in neural networks with complex structures but a poor prediction. Moreover, due to the large magnitude of ocean climate variability over long intervals, they also ignored nearby prediction results when predicting the Niño 3.4 index for the next month, which led to large errors. To solve these problem, we propose a spatio-temporal transformer network to model the inherent characteristics of the sea surface temperature anomaly map and heat content anomaly map along with the changes in space and time by designing an effective attention mechanism, and innovatively incorporate temporal index into the feature learning procedure to model the influence of seasonal variation on the prediction of the ENSO phenomenon. More importantly, to better conduct long-term prediction, we propose an effective recurrent prediction strategy using previous prediction as prior knowledge to enhance the reliability of long-term prediction. Extensive experimental results show that our model can provide an 18-month valid ENSO prediction, which validates the effectiveness of our method.

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