• The Sea:JOURNAL OF THE KOREAN SOCIETY OF OCEANOGRAPHY
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.49-70
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• 2022

Sea Surface Temperature (SST), one of the ocean features, has a significant impact on climate, marine ecosystem and human activities. Therefore, SST prediction has been always an important issue. Recently, deep learning has drawn much attentions, since it can predict SST by training past SST patterns. Compared to the numerical simulations, deep learning model is highly efficient, since it can estimate nonlinear relationships between input data. With the recent development of Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in computer, large amounts of data can be calculated repeatedly and rapidly. In this study, Short-term SST will be predicted through Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based U-Net that can handle spatiotemporal data concurrently and overcome the drawbacks of previously existing deep learning-based models. The SST prediction performance depends on the seasonal and interannual SST variabilities around the southern coast of Korea. The predicted SST has a wide range of variance during spring and summer, while it has small range of variance during fall and winter. A wide range of variance also has a significant correlation with the change of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) index. These results are found to be affected by the intensity of the seasonal and PDO-related interannual SST fronts and their intensity variations along the southern Korean seas. This study implies that the SST prediction performance using the developed deep learning model can be significantly varied by seasonal and interannual variabilities in SST.