A coordination attention residual U-Net model for enhanced short and mid-term sea surface temperature prediction

Sea surface temperature (SST) is crucial for studying global oceans and evaluating ecosystems. Accurately predicting short and mid-term daily SST has been a significant challenge in oceanography. Traditional deep learning methods can handle temporal data and spatial features but often struggle with long-range spatiotemporal dependencies. To address this, we propose a coordination attention residual U-Net(CResU-Net) model designed to better capture the dynamic spatiotemporal correlations of high-resolution SST. The model integrates coordinate attention mechanisms, multiple residual modules, and depthwise separable convolutions to enhance prediction capabilities. The spatiotemporal variations of SST across different areas of the South China Sea are complex, making accurate predictions challenging. Experiments across various regions of the South China Sea show the model’s effectiveness and robust generalization in predicting high-resolution daily SST. For a 10-day forecast period, the model achieves approximately 0.3 °C in RMSE, outperforming several advanced models.