On the Limits of Univariate Deep Learning for Significant Wave Height Forecasting

Abstract:This study conducts a systematic hyperparameter search across five deep learning architectures, DLinear, LSTM, PatchTST, ResAttLstm, and Mamba2, and nine context lengths (1-168 h) for single-station significant wave height (Hs) forecasting on NDBC buoy 41009, followed by re-evaluation of the best configurations on a 47-buoy, 37-year corpus. The five families converge to a common performance level on the multi-buoy evaluation (between-family SD = 0.0014 m^2, 0.8% of the grand mean), a spread dwarfed by the 4.83x cross-dataset MSE shift between buoy corpora. All multi-buoy trials beat persistence (mean skill +0.062), but no architecture consistently outperforms the others. On the single-buoy experiment, skill peaks at 12-24 h where five trials fall below persistence, per-family Q4/Q3 test MSE ratios range from 2.4 to 2.6, and deep models underperform persistence for the most extreme 1% of waves. These findings are consistent with the interpretation that persistence already captures the dominant linear-inertial signal in univariate Hs, and that architecture engineering under this univariate input setting has reached diminishing returns: cross-buoy variance, not model class, dominates forecast error. Future work should prioritise atmospheric covariates, zero-shot cross-buoy transfer, and decomposition of Hs into swell and wind-sea components. By establishing a rigorous reference baseline for what univariate Hs models can and cannot achieve, this study provides a benchmark against which future multivariate and physics-informed approaches can be calibrated, and offers practical guidance for lightweight buoy-level forecasting in mid-latitude storm-dominated and swell-mixed environments.

33 pages, 13 figures. Author-accepted manuscript

Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph)

arXiv:2609.30688 [physics.ao-ph]

(or arXiv:2609.30688v1 [physics.ao-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.30688 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oceaneng.2026.127187 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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