Physics-guided deep learning for skillful wind-wave modeling

Modeling sea surface wind-waves is crucial for both scientific research and engineering applications. Nowadays, the most accurate wave models are based on numerical methods, which primarily concern the wave spectrum evolution by solving wave action balance partial differential equations. These methods are computationally expensive and limited by incomplete physical representations of wave spectral evolution. Here, we present a deep learning-based wave model trained using observation-merged wave hindcasts. Guided by the physics knowledge that waves are either generated by local current winds or by remote historical winds, this method can directly model significant wave height, bypassing the need for wave spectral information. This feature engineering effectively reduces the complexity of model inputs and outputs. The resulting artificial intelligence method can model 1 year of global significant wave heights at a 0.5° × 0.5° × 1-hour resolution within half an hour on a personal computer, achieving higher accuracy than state-of-the-art numerical wave models.