Advancing sea level anomaly modeling in the black sea with LSTM Auto-Encoders: A novel approach

Abstract

Rising sea levels pose significant risks to coastal communities and ecosystems. Accurate modeling of sea level changes is crucial for effective environmental management and disaster mitigation. Machine learning methods are emerging as an important asset in improving sea level predictions and understanding the impacts of climate change. Especially, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models have emerged as a powerful tool for sea level anomaly modeling, but there is an increasing need for more advanced models in this area. This study enhances existing methodologies by introducing a novel approach using an LSTM Auto-Encoder model, designed to compress input data into a lower-dimensional latent space before reconstructing it, thereby capturing complex temporal dependencies and anomalies effectively. We compared LSTM Auto-Encoder model performance with that of a Stacked LSTM network, which learns complex temporal patterns through multiple layers, and a traditional damped-persistence statistical model. Our results demonstrate that the LSTM Auto-Encoder model not only outperformed these models in predicting sea level anomalies across various lead times but also exhibited superior generalization capabilities across both satellite altimeter and in-situ data. These findings highlight the potential of the LSTM Auto-Encoder model as a powerful tool in coastal management and climate change studies, underscoring the critical role of advanced machine learning techniques in enhancing our predictive abilities and informing disaster preparedness strategies. © 2024 Elsevier Ltd