Southwestern Atlantic ocean fronts detected from the fusion of multi-source remote sensing data by a deep learning model

Abstract

In the Southwestern Atlantic, the Falkland Current intrudes onto the South American shelf, resulting in the meeting of two water masses which are completely different in temperature and dynamic characteristics, thus generating the Southwestern Atlantic Front (SAF). Therefore, the SAF has prominent characteristics of thermal and dynamics. The current ocean front detection is mainly by performing gradient operations on sea surface temperature (SST) data, where regions with large temperature gradients are considered as ocean fronts. The thermal gradient method largely ignores the dynamical features, leading to inaccurate manifestation of SAF. This study develops a deep learning model, SAFNet, to detect the SAF through the synergy of 10-year (2010-2019) satellite-derived SST and sea surface height (SSH) observations to achieve high accuracy detection of SAF with fused thermal and dynamic characteristics. The comparative experimental results show that the detection accuracy of SAFNet reaches 99.45%, which is significantly better than other models. By comparing the frontal probability (FP) obtained by SST, SSH and SST-SSH fusion data respectively, it is proved that the necessity of fusion multi-source remote sensing data for SAF detection. The detection results of fusion data can reflect the spatial distribution of SAF more comprehensively and accurately. According to the meridional variation of FP, the main reason for the seasonal variation of the SAF is the change in its thermal characteristics, and the SAF has stable dynamic characteristics.