Short‐Term Sea Fog Area Forecast: A New Data Set and Deep Learning Approach

Abstract

AbstractPrompt and precise forecast of sea fog regions ensures maritime navigational safety. This paper establishes a prompt and precise forecast of sea fog regions that ensure maritime navigational safety. This paper establishes a multivariable sea fog forecast (MV‐SFF) data set and proposes a deep learning‐based forecast method named rich‐element aggregated (REA) for short‐term forecasts. The MV‐SFF data set contains 122 sea fog events from 2010 to 2020. Each event in the MV‐SFF data set includes meteorological variables from reanalysis data and geostationary ocean color imager satellite images captured hourly on the day of the sea fog occurrence. This data set aims to comprehensively utilize meteorological elements and remote sensing observations to predict the spatial changes of sea fog areas in the next 7 hours. The proposed REA model can extract and integrate features from historical meteorological elements of different types, times, and spatial locations. In addition, REA utilizes a position‐aware edge detection mechanism to locate the exact position of sea fog. We perform a seven‐hour ahead forecast starting from 09:16 local time and show promising forecasting results, which demonstrate the fog area forecast ability of our model. Compared with existing advanced deep learning networks, the REA model is superior in performance and stability.