Interpretable Adaptive Multiscale Spatiotemporal Network for Long-Term Global Sea Surface Temperature Prediction

Sea surface temperature (SST) serves as a fundamental driver of ocean–atmosphere interactions and global climate variability, exhibiting strong nonstationarity, multiscale dynamics, and cross-variable coupling. However, current deep learning models often fail to capture these complex characteristics, limiting their ability to support accurate and physically consistent long-term SST prediction. To address these issues, we propose PAMSTnet, a unified deep learning framework for physics-informed adaptive multiscale spatiotemporal prediction. PAMSTnet leverages three-dimensional empirical wavelet transform (3DEWT) to learn interpretable multiscale spatiotemporal dynamics from raw observations, and applies multivariate spatiotemporal empirical orthogonal function (MSTEOF) to identify dominant cross-variable coupled modes. These physically meaningful representations are integrated into a deep ConvLSTM predictive network (DCPN) to support coordinated multiscale dynamical learning. Furthermore, PAMSTnet introduces physics-informed consistency learning (PICL) to enforce thermodynamic and dynamic constraints, enhancing physical consistency and interpretability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PAMSTnet achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art baselines in long-term global SST prediction, reducing RMSE by 8.1% and improving ACC by 2.8% compared with the best-performing baseline, particularly under extreme climate events. Interpretation insights further highlight PAMSTnet’s adaptive representation of variable contributions and regional physical drivers. These findings position PAMSTnet as a promising paradigm for developing intelligent ocean prediction systems with enhanced physical consistency and interpretability.