Implicit Assimilation of Sparse In Situ Data for Dense & Global Storm Surge Forecasting

Patrick Ebel, Brandon Victor, Peter Naylor, Gabriele Meoni, Federico Serva, Rochelle Schneider; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2024, pp. 471-480

Hurricanes and coastal floods are among the most disastrous natural hazards. Both are intimately related to storm surges as their causes and effects respectively. However the short-term forecasting of storm surges has proven challenging especially when targeting previously unseen locations or sites without tidal gauges. Furthermore recent work improved short and medium-term weather forecasting but the handling of raw unassimilated data remains non-trivial. In this paper we tackle both challenges and demonstrate that neural networks can implicitly assimilate sparse in situ tide gauge data with coarse ocean state reanalysis in order to forecast storm surges. We curate a global dataset to learn and validate the dense prediction of storm surges building on preceding efforts. Other than prior work limited to known gauges our approach extends to ungauged sites paving the way for global storm surge forecasting.