Sea surface temperature (SST) is closely related to global climate change, ocean disasters, and ocean ecosystems, so the accurate prediction of SST is an important topic. The existing regional SST prediction methods treat the time series of SST data as a series of matrixes, each corresponding to the regional SST at a particular time. The spatial and temporal features are extracted from the matrix series for later SST prediction. However, the existing SST prediction methods fail to fully consider the imbalanced influence of temporal and spatial features on the SST, leading to the neglection of some key information and limiting the improvement of prediction accuracy. To address this problem, we proposed a regional SST prediction method (CRA-ConvLSTM) combining temporal attention mechanism and spatial attention mechanism. This enabled the model to dynamically assign different influence weights to the temporal features at different times and spatial features at different locations, thereby improving the accuracy of SST prediction. Specifically, the input regional SST time series was first encoded into multi-layer feature vectors by a convolutional neural network (CNN), and local features were extracted. Then, the residual time attention module was constructed to learn the attention weight at different moments adaptively, and the key features of the time dimension were extracted. The residual spatial attention module was designed to extract the key features of different points in the region in terms of the spatial dimension. In addition, the attention mechanism combined with the residual structure can avoid performance degradation caused by information reduction in the network. Experimental results show that the proposed model could achieve 0.19 and 99.43% respectively in terms of the root mean square error (RMSE) and prediction accuracy (PACC), which is superior to other methods and effectively improves the prediction accuracy of SST.

 time series, sea surface temperature prediction, spatial-temporal feature, attention mechanism, residual structure