The Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences

2027 Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences

January 12-15, 2027

A Neural Framework for Discovering Causal Drivers of Multi-Strait Indonesian Throughflow
ID:816 Poster Presentation

2027-01-15 17:45 (China Standard Time)

Session:Session 32 - AI for Ocean Dynamics: advancements, discoveries and challenges

Abstract

The Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) is a key oceanic pathway connecting the Pacific and Indian Oceans, exerting important influences on regional air–sea interactions, heat and salt transport, and global climate variability. However, multi-channel ITF transport is jointly regulated by multiple physical processes, including regional sea surface height, wind forcing, and density stratification. Its dominant controlling factors and lagged response mechanisms remain difficult to directly identify from traditional statistical models or black-box prediction models. To address this issue, this study develops an interpretable neural causal discovery framework for multi-channel ITF transport prediction. The framework organizes regional sea surface height (SSH), wind stress, and density stratification proxy variables into a physically meaningful candidate causal-edge space, and learns potential causal dependencies among source variables, lag windows, and transport channels through a lag-window-level Neural Granger mechanism. Furthermore, this study adopts a cross-random-seed gradient attribution stability screening strategy to extract stable and sparse causal candidate edges, and retrains the prediction model using stable-edge masks, thereby improving the reliability and physical consistency of causal interpretation while maintaining predictive skill. The experimental results show that stable causal-edge constraints can substantially reduce the number of candidate edges while maintaining or improving model prediction performance. Cross-seed stable edge screening further reveals that different ITF transport channels exhibit significant differences in their dominant controlling factors and lagged response scales, indicating channel-specific dynamical regulation structures among ITF branches. This framework not only provides a physically guided and interpretable modeling approach for multi-channel ITF transport prediction, but also offers a new technical pathway for data-driven causal mechanism identification in complex ocean circulation systems.

Speaker
Meihua Zhao Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Author
Meihua Zhao Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

    Important Dates

    • Jan 30

      2026

      Session / Event proposals open

    • Mar 31

      2026

      Session / Event proposals close
      (Extended to April 7)

    • Apr 30

      2026

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    • Apr 30

      2026

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    • Jun 30

      2026

      Abstract submissions close
      (Extended to July 21)

    • Aug 31

      2026

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    • Sep 15

      2026

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    • Oct 15

      2026

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    • Jan 12–15

      2027

      XMAS 2027