A deep learning approach to extract internal tides scattered by
geostrophic turbulence
Abstract
A proper extraction of internal tidal signals is central to the
interpretation of Sea Surface Height (SSH) data, yet challenging in
upcoming satellite missions, where traditional harmonic analysis may
break down at finer observed spatial scales known to contain significant
wave-mean interactions. However, the wide swaths featured in such
satellite missions render SSH snapshots that are spatially
two-dimensional, which allows us to treat the tidal extraction as an
image translation problem. We design and train a conditional Generative
Adversarial Network, which, given a snapshot of raw SSH from an
idealized numerical eddying simulation, generates a snapshot of the
embedded tidal component. We test it on synthetic data whose dynamical
regimes are different from the data provided during training. Despite
the diversity and complexity of data, it accurately extracts tidal
components in most individual snapshots considered and reproduces
physically meaningful statistical properties.