Neural Network‐Based Methods for Ocean Surface Wave Measurement Using Submarine Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS)

Abstract Two new data‐driven models for estimating ocean surface waves from distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) submarine cable strain rate are developed using supervised machine learning on a 10‐day data set collected offshore of Oliktok Point, Alaska. The new models were trained on target data from seafloor pressure moorings at three sites spaced evenly along 27.1 km of cable and were benchmarked against an empirical transfer function method previously used to estimate waves from DAS. A model which uses convolutional neural networks to transform 2‐km frequency‐wavenumber strain spectra to seafloor pressure spectra outperforms the benchmark in wave height prediction (RMSE of 0.15 vs. 0.41 m) and period prediction (0.29 vs. 0.37 s) when evaluated on a held‐out test data set. When applied to a DAS data set collected on the same cable 2 years prior, the CNN‐based model maintained similar significant wave height performance (RMSE = 0.23 m) relative to available satellite altimetry data. A two‐hidden‐layer, fully connected neural network which transforms 1‐D strain spectra to seafloor pressure spectra also outperforms the benchmark in wave height prediction (RMSE of 0.19 vs. 0.41 m), but does not generalize as well to the prior data. Regression‐based machine learning is useful for estimating waves from DAS data when the pressure‐strain relationship varies temporally and spatially across different wave conditions. Models can be applied to DAS data to measure waves with higher spatial resolution and longer temporal coverage than traditional methods, which often measure waves only at a single point.