A Diffusion Weighted Ensemble Framework for Robust Short-Horizon Global SST Forecasting from Multivariate GODAS Data

Accurate time series forecasting of sea surface temperature (SST) is essential for understanding the ocean climate system and large-scale ocean circulation, yet it remains challenging due to regime-dependent variability and correlated errors across heterogeneous prediction models. This study addresses these challenges by formulating SST ensemble time series forecasting aggregation as a stochastic, sample-adaptive weighting problem. We propose a diffusion-conditioned ensemble framework in which heterogeneous base forecasters generate out-of-sample SST predictions that are combined through a noise-conditioned weighting network. The proposed framework produces convex, sample-specific mixture weights without requiring iterative reverse-time sampling. The approach is evaluated on short-horizon global SST forecasting using the Global Ocean Data Assimilation System (GODAS) reanalysis as a representative multivariate dataset. Under a controlled experimental protocol with fixed input windows and one-step-ahead prediction, the proposed method is compared against individual deep learning forecasters and conventional global pooling strategies, including uniform averaging and validation-optimized convex weighting. The results show that adaptive, diffusion-weighted aggregation yields consistent improvements in error metrics over the best single-model baseline and static pooling rules, with more pronounced gains in several mid- to high-latitude regimes. These findings indicate that stochastic, condition-dependent weighting provides an effective and computationally practical framework for enhancing the robustness of multivariate time series forecasting, with direct applicability to global SST prediction from large-scale geophysical reanalysis data.