Physics-Informed Tensor-Train ConvLSTM for Volumetric Velocity Forecasting of the Loop Current

According to the National Academies, a week long forecast of velocity, vertical structure, and duration of the Loop Current (LC) and its eddies at a given location is a critical step toward understanding their effects on the gulf ecosystems as well as toward anticipating and mitigating the outcomes of anthropogenic and natural disasters in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM). However, creating such a forecast has remained a challenging problem since LC behavior is dominated by dynamic processes across multiple time and spatial scales not resolved at once by conventional numerical models. In this paper, building on the foundation of spatiotemporal predictive learning in video prediction, we develop a physics informed deep learning based prediction model called—Physics-informed Tensor-train ConvLSTM (PITT-ConvLSTM)—for forecasting 3D geo-spatiotemporal sequences. Specifically, we propose (1) a novel 4D higher-order recurrent neural network with empirical orthogonal function analysis to capture the hidden uncorrelated patterns of each hierarchy, (2) a convolutional tensor-train decomposition to capture higher-order space-time correlations, and (3) a mechanism that incorporates prior physics from domain experts by informing the learning in latent space. The advantage of our proposed approach is clear: constrained by the law of physics, the prediction model simultaneously learns good representations for frame dependencies (both short-term and long-term high-level dependency) and inter-hierarchical relations within each time frame. Experiments on geo-spatiotemporal data collected from the GoM demonstrate that the PITT-ConvLSTM model can successfully forecast the volumetric velocity of the LC and its eddies for a period greater than 1 week.