Artificial Neural Network for the Short-Term Prediction of Arctic Sea Ice Concentration

In this paper, we applied an artificial neural network (ANN) to the short-term prediction of the Arctic sea ice concentration (SIC). The prediction was performed using encoding and decoding processes, in which a gated recurrent unit encodes sequential sea ice data, and a feed-forward neural network model decodes the encoded input data. Because of the large volume of Arctic sea ice data, the ANN predicts the future SIC of each cell individually. The limitation of these singular predictions is that they do not use information from other cells. This results in low accuracy, particularly when there are drastic changes during melting and freezing seasons. To address this issue, we present a new data scheme including global and local SIC information, where the global information is represented by sea ice statistics. We trained ANNs using different data schemes and network architectures, and then compared their performances quantitatively and visually. The results show that, compared with a data scheme that uses only local sea ice information, the newly proposed scheme leads to a significant improvement in prediction accuracy.