Learning Ocean Submesoscale Turbulent Heat Transport by Machine Learning

Juncheng Zhang1, Zhan Su1
1Department of Physics, University of Toronto, Canada

Submesoscale fronts and filaments in the ocean mixed layer generate strong vertical motions that can substantially influence vertical heat exchange, yet these processes are largely unresolved in climate-scale ocean models. As a result, accurate parameterization of submesoscale vertical heat flux is essential. Here, we aim to learn the relationships between submesoscale heat fluxes and commonly available ocean variables by training machine-learning models on submesoscale-resolving data. To emulate the information available to coarse-resolution models, high-resolution fields are temporally filtered and spatially coarse-grained to a target grid scale. From the resulting coarse mixed-layer fields, we construct physically interpretable predictors that characterize frontal strength and local kinematics, including buoyancy, horizontal gradients, relative vorticity, divergence, strain, mixed-layer depth, and horizontal velocity magnitude. The learning target is the submesoscale contribution to the mixed-layer vertical heat flux, diagnosed as the residual between the high-resolution flux and its mesoscale component. Given the strong spatial coherence and temporal persistence of submesoscale signals in the mixed layer, we adopt a UNet–LSTM architecture. The UNet maps coarse-resolution inputs to spatially distributed unresolved heat-flux patterns, while the LSTM incorporates short-term temporal context. Results demonstrate accurate and stable predictions on an unseen test dataset and support the feasibility of machine-learning-based parameterizations for representing submesoscale heat fluxes in climate models.