Ocean wave height series prediction with numerical long short-term memory

This paper investigates the possibility of using machine learning technology to correct wave height series numerical predictions. This is done by incorporating numerical predictions into long short-term memory (LSTM). Specifically, a novel ocean wave height series prediction framework, referred to as numerical long short-term memory (N-LSTM), is introduced. The N-LSTM takes a combined wave height representation, which is formed of a current wave height measurement and a subsequent Simulating Waves Nearshore (SWAN) numerical prediction, as the input and generates the corrected numerical prediction as the output. The correction is achieved by two modules in cascade, i.e., the LSTM module and the Gaussian approximation module. The LSTM module characterizes the correlation between measurement and numerical prediction. The Gaussian approximation module models the conditional probabilistic distribution of the wave height given the learned LSTM. The corrected numerical prediction is obtained by sampling the conditional probabilistic distribution and the corrected numerical prediction series is obtained by iterating the N-LSTM. Experimental results validate that our N-LSTM effectively lifts the accuracy of wave height numerical prediction from SWAN for the Bohai Sea and Xiaomaidao. Furthermore, compared with the state-of-the-art machine learning based prediction methods (e.g., residual learning), the N-LSTM achieves better prediction accuracy by 10% to 20% for the prediction time varying from 3 to 72 h.

Journal of Marine Science and Engineering