Multi-task Deep Convolutional Network to Predict Sea Ice Concentration and Drift in the Arctic Ocean

Forecasting sea ice concentration (SIC) and sea ice drift (SID) in the Arctic Ocean is of great significance as the Arctic environment has been changed by the recent warming climate. Given that physical sea ice models require high computational costs with complex parameterization, deep learning techniques can effectively replace the physical model and improve the performance of sea ice prediction. This study proposes a novel multi-task fully conventional network architecture named hierarchical information-sharing U-net (HIS-Unet) to predict daily SIC and SID. Instead of learning SIC and SID separately at each branch, we allow the SIC and SID layers to share their information and assist each other's prediction through the weighting attention modules (WAMs). Consequently, our HIS-Unet outperforms other statistical approaches, sea ice physical models, and neural networks without such information-sharing units. The improvement of HIS-Unet is obvious both for SIC and SID prediction when and where sea ice conditions change seasonally, which implies that the information sharing through WAMs allows the model to learn the sudden changes of SIC and SID. The weight values of the WAMs imply that SIC information plays a more critical role in SID prediction, compared to that of SID information in SIC prediction, and information sharing is more active in sea ice edges (seasonal sea ice) than in the central Arctic (multi-year sea ice).