Multi-Task Spatiotemporal Deep Learning Based Arctic Sea Ice Prediction ...

• Main Authors: Bourne Jr., Jamal, Hu, Michael, Kim, Eliot, Kruse, Peter, Lama, Skylar, Ali, Sahara, Huang, Yiyi, Wang, Jianwu
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: UMBC HPCF 2021
• Subjects: UMBC High Performance Computing Facilty HPCF; Arctic; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.13016/m2tk7h-gil8; https://mdsoar.org/handle/11603/23253

Important natural resources in the Arctic rely heavily on sea ice, making it important to forecast Arctic sea ice changes. Arctic sea ice forecasting often involves two connected tasks: sea ice concentration at each pixel and overall sea ice extent. Instead of having two separate models for two forecasting tasks, in this report, we study how to use multi-task learning techniques and leverage the connections between ice concentration and ice extent to improve accuracy for both prediction tasks. Because of the spatiotemporal nature of the data, we designed two novel multi-task learning models based on CNNs and ConvLSTMs, respectively. We also developed a custom loss function which trains the models to ignore land pixels when making predictions. Our experiments show our models can have better accuracies than separate models that predict sea ice extent and concentration separately, and that our accuracies are better than or comparable with results in the state-of-the-art studies. ...