OceanBench: The Sea Surface Height Edition

Abstract: The ocean profoundly influences human activities and plays a critical role in climate regulation. Our understanding has improved over the last decades with the advent of satellite remote sensing data, allowing us to capture essential quantities over the globe, e.g., sea surface height (SSH). However, ocean satellite data presents challenges for information extraction due to their sparsity and irregular sampling, signal complexity, and noise. Machine learning (ML) techniques have demonstrated their capabilities in dealing with large-scale, complex signals. Therefore we see an opportunity for ML models to harness the information contained in ocean satellite data. However, data representation and relevant evaluation metrics can be the defining factors when determining the success of applied ML. The processing steps from the raw observation data to a ML-ready state and from model outputs to interpretable quantities require domain expertise, which can be a significant barrier to entry for ML researchers. OceanBench is a unifying framework that provides standardized processing steps that comply with domain-expert standards. It provides plug-and-play data and pre-configured pipelines for ML researchers to benchmark their models and a transparent configurable framework for researchers to customize and extend the pipeline for their tasks. In this work, we demonstrate the OceanBench framework through a first edition dedicated to SSH interpolation challenges. We provide datasets and ML-ready benchmarking pipelines for the long-standing problem of interpolating observations from simulated ocean satellite data, multi-modal and multi-sensor fusion issues, and transfer-learning to real ocean satellite observations. The OceanBench framework is available at github.com/jejjohnson/oceanbench and the dataset registry is available at github.com/quentinf00/oceanbench-data-registry.