Multi-modal deep learning models for ocean wind speed estimation

Because it depends on multiple atmospheric and oceanographic variables interacting with each other at the sea surface, accurately forecasting offshore surface wind speed is challenging for oceanographers. However, with the expansion of today’s Big Ocean Data, the same offshore site can now be monitored by multiple sensors such as hydrophones, satellites or weather buoys. These data are highly heterogeneous, but each of them can potentially bring complementary information on an ocean process. In this paper, a deep generative model is designed to jointly represent Underwater Passive Acoustics (UPA) and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images into the same latent space to describe surface wind speed located in the Ligurian Sea (North Western Mediterranean Sea). Qualitative and quantitative results obtained demonstrate that SAR images are able to refine the estimation of UPA for low wind speeds.