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Sea surface height super-resolution using high-resolution sea surface temperature with a subpixel convolutional residual network

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2022

Théo Archambault*
Affiliation:
Sorbonne University, CNRS, LIP6, Paris, France
Anastase Charantonis
Affiliation:
Laboratoire D’Océanographie et du Climat: Experimentation et Approches Numeriques, Sorbonne University, Paris, France École nationale supérieure d’informatique, LAMME, Evry, France
Dominique Béréziat
Affiliation:
Sorbonne University, CNRS, LIP6, Paris, France
Carlos Mejia
Affiliation:
Laboratoire D’Océanographie et du Climat: Experimentation et Approches Numeriques, Sorbonne University, Paris, France
Sylvie Thiria
Affiliation:
Laboratoire D’Océanographie et du Climat: Experimentation et Approches Numeriques, Sorbonne University, Paris, France
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: theo.archambault@lip6.fr

Abstract

The oceans have a very important role in climate regulation due to their massive heat storage capacity. Thus, for the past decades, oceans have been observed by satellites to better understand their dynamics. Satellites retrieve several data with various spatial resolutions. For instance, sea surface height (SSH) is a low-resolution data field where sea surface temperature (SST) can be retrieved in a much higher one. These two physical parameters are linked by a physical link that can be learned by a super-resolution machine-learning algorithm. In this work, we present a subpixel convolutional deep learning model that takes advantage of the higher resolution SST field to guide the downscaling of the SSH one. The data fields that we use are simulated by a physic-based ocean model at a higher sampling rate than the satellites provide. We compared our approach with a convolutional neural network model. Our architecture generalized well with validation performances of 3.94 cm root mean squared error (RMSE) and training performances of 2.65 cm RMSE.

Information

Type
Application Paper
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1. Comparison between the vanilla downscaling method used in Thiria et al. (2022) and this paper. The main two differences are that we increase the SSH resolution one step further but we do not retrieve the ocean circulation.

Figure 1

Figure 2. Comparison of the architectures of one downscaling step for RESAC and RESACsub. For each layer, the output number of channels is given below it.

Figure 2

Figure 3. Pixel shuffler and inverse pixel shuffler.

Figure 3

Figure 4. Comparison of the two BN methods for a one-dimensional example. For each channel, we write the mean and standard deviation below it and the learned parameters are in bold.

Figure 4

Figure 5. Network output for SSH at R03. The first line is the estimated SSH of the same day (March 10) and the second line is the error map associated.

Figure 5

Figure 6. Zoom on the error map of the two subpixel models RESACsub BN and RESACsub supBNsub, and the denoising network applied on RESACsub supBNsub. We can clearly see the $ 3\times 3 $ pattern on the two subpixel models, where the denoiser removes it.

Figure 6

Table 1. Mean and standard deviation scores on 10 rounds of training of each architecture with different weight initializations.

Figure 7

Table 2. Ablation study of the BN network.