LangYa: Revolutionizing Cross-Spatiotemporal Ocean Forecasting

Abstract

Ocean forecasting is crucial for both scientific research and societal benefits. Currently, the most accurate forecasting systems are global ocean forecasting systems (GOFSs), which represent the ocean state variables (OSVs) as discrete grids and solve partial differential equations (PDEs) governing the transitions of oceanic state variables using numerical methods. However, GOFSs processes are computationally expensive and prone to cumulative errors. Recently, large artificial intelligence (AI)-based models significantly boosted forecasting speed and accuracy. Unfortunately, building a large AI ocean forecasting system that can be considered cross-spatiotemporal and air-sea coupled forecasts remains a significant challenge. Here, we introduce LangYa, a cross-spatiotemporal and air-sea coupled ocean forecasting system. Results demonstrate that the time embedding module in LangYa enables a single model to make forecasts with lead times ranging from 1 to 7 days. The air-sea coupled module effectively simulates air-sea interactions. The ocean self-attention module improves network stability and accelerates convergence during training, and the adaptive thermocline loss function improves the accuracy of thermocline forecasting. Compared to existing numerical and AI-based ocean forecasting systems, LangYa uses 27 years of global ocean data from the Global Ocean Reanalysis and Simulation version 12 (GLORYS12) for training and achieves more reliable deterministic forecasting results for OSVs. LangYa forecasting system provides global ocean researchers with access to a powerful software tool for accurate ocean forecasting and opens a new paradigm for ocean science.