A significant wave height prediction method combining VMD decomposition and the GVSAO-CNN-BiGRU-SA model

To improve the accuracy and robustness of significant wave height prediction under complex marine conditions, a multi-strategy Snow Ablation Optimization (GVSAO) model based on the Good Point Set Initialization Strategy (G), Cyclic Oscillation Mutation Strategy (V), and Snow Ablation Optimizer (SAO) is proposed to enhance parameter optimization. The GVSAO model combines Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units (BiGRU), and a Self-Attention Mechanism (SA) to construct the GVSAO-CNN-BiGRU-SA framework, which fully exploits the nonlinear characteristics of wave height time series. The study utilizes observed data from two observation points along the U.S. East Coast to the Gulf of Mexico (Stations 41013 and 42002) as well as from the Arabian Sea (Station 23020) and the Pacific Ocean (Station 46044). Comparative experiments on input feature combinations reveal that Intrinsic Mode Function (IMF) components derived from Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) contribute more significantly to prediction accuracy than single physical features by effectively capturing dynamic time-frequency characteristics. The results demonstrate that the GVSAO model outperforms SAO, GSAO, and VSAO in terms of global exploration and stability, as validated by performance comparisons on the CEC2005 benchmark functions. Compared with the BiGRU model, the GVSAO-CNN-BiGRU-SA model exhibited superior performance, with RMSE reduced by 44.01% at Station 41013 and 15.12% at Station 42002. Similarly, it outperformed the CNN-BiGRU and CNN-BiGRU-SA models across all key metrics. The model achieved high-accuracy predictions in diverse marine environments, with relative mean errors within 0.5472%, RMSE within 0.1064 m, and correlation coefficients (R2) exceeding 0.99. Furthermore, in multi-step forecasting (3 to 48 hours), the model maintained high reliability with R2 values remaining above 0.84 across diverse geographic environments. The GVSAO-CNN-BiGRU-SA model provides a reliable solution for wave height prediction, contributing to marine engineering early warnings and energy utilization.