Application of Deep Learning in Sea Surface Height Estimation of GNSS Data Sets

In this work, we used the convolutional neural network (CNN) method to invert sea surface height (SSH) from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) delayed Doppler map (DDM) data during 2009–2017 and compared the CNN inversion data with those obtained from traditional simple random forest (RF) method. SSH observations from the OSTM/Jason-2 satellite were used to judge the merits of the two methods. The results show that both methods yield good SSH inversion results, but when the training set is 9000, the root mean square errors of the SSH inversion results based on the CNN and the RF method are 16.78 and 15.96 respectively; as the training set increases above 9000, the accuracy of the CNN method is significantly better than that of the RF method. This suggests that SSH inversion based on the CNN method will become more advantageous as more data become available.