Oceanic Eddy Identification Using an AI Scheme

Abstract

Oceanic eddies play an important role in global energy and material transport, and contribute greatly to nutrient and phytoplankton distribution. Deep learning is employed to identify oceanic eddies from sea surface height anomalies data. In order to adapt to segmentation problems for multi-scale oceanic eddies, the pyramid scene parsing network (PSPNet), which is able to satisfy the fusion of semantics and details, is applied as the core algorithm in the eddy detection methods. The results of eddies identified from this artificial intelligence (AI) method are well compared with those from a traditional vector geometry-based (VG) method. More oceanic eddies are detected by the AI algorithm than the VG method, especially for small-scale eddies. Therefore, the present study demonstrates that the AI algorithm is applicable of oceanic eddy detection. It is one of the first few of efforts to bridge AI techniques and oceanography research.