Leveraging synthetic data to improve regional sea level predictions

The rapid increase in sea levels driven by climate change presents serious risks to coastal communities around the globe. Traditional prediction models frequently concentrate on developed regions with extensive tide gauge networks, leaving a significant gap in data and forecasts for developing countries where the tide gauges are sparse. This study presents a novel deep learning approach that combines TimesGAN with ConvLSTM to enhance regional sea level predictions using the more widely available satellite altimetry data. By generating synthetic training data with TimesGAN, we can significantly improve the predictive accuracy of the ConvLSTM model. Our method is tested across three developed regions—Shanghai, New York, and Lisbon—and three developing regions—Liberia, Gabon, and Somalia. The results reveal that integrating TimesGAN reduces the average mean squared error of the ConvLSTM prediction by approximately 66.1%, 76.6%, 64.5%, 78.2%, 81.7% and 85.1% for Shanghai, New York, Lisbon, Liberia, Gabon, and Somalia, respectively. This underscores the effectiveness of synthetic data in enhancing sea level prediction accuracy, across all regions studied.