Forecasting sea surface temperature with feed-forward artificial networks in combating the global climate change: The sample of Rize, Türkiye

Abstract

The increase of the world population, especially in the global competition, together with the increasing use of fossil fuel resources to meet energy needs, leads to more greenhouse gases (more than one CO2, methane etc.) emissions and the global climate crisis. In this process, changes in meteorological events such as temperature, precipitation, and wind, attract attention moreover but when considered as a whole, we know that these negative changes in the ecosystem negatively affect many living groups. Sea Surface Temperature (SST) as measured meteorologically is the most important environmental parameter where these changes are monitored and observed. It draws attention to the fact that changes in SST are not limited to living organisms as habitats, but also catalyze many chain reactions, especially socio-economic impacts. Therefore, much of the work is devoted to forecasting studies to adapt to changing habitats and take the necessary precautions against potential risks. Feed-forward artificial neural networks have been commonly used to address these emerging needs. Artificial neural networks, which are a simple imitation of the human neurological system, have been used as an artificial intelligence method in forecasting problems due to their superior performance and not having the limitations of classical time series. In this study, the forecasting of the time series of monthly mean SST temperature obtained from Rize station between the years 2010 and 2020 is performed by using feed-forward artificial neural networks, and the forecasting performance of the corresponding time series is compared with many forecasting methods with different characteristics. The comparison of the methods used the mean square error and mean absolute percentage error criteria, which are commonly used in the forecasting literature. The analysis results showed that the analysis results obtained with the feed-forward artificial neural networks have the best prediction performance. As a result, it can be stated that the sea surface temperature can be forecasted with a very high accuracy using the feed-forward artificial neural networks.