YOLO based Ocean Eddy Localization with AWS SageMaker

Abstract

Ocean eddies play a significant role both at the sea surface and beneath it, contributing to the sustainability of marine ecosystems and influencing broader oceanic and climatic behaviors. Investigating ocean eddies is essential for monitoring changes in the Earth’s oceans and their impact on climate. This study focuses on benchmarking the performance of state-of-theart YOLO (You Only Look Once) models for locating small-scale (<20km) ocean eddies using satellite remote sensing images. We leverage AWS SageMaker for this evaluation, utilizing both single and multi-GPU configurations to explore the feasibility and efficiency of deploying AI applications in cloud-based environments. This research not only assesses the effectiveness of SageMaker in handling complex Earth science data but also provides insights into deployment challenges, resource management for large-scale data, and the overall user experience. The findings highlight the strengths and limitations of using SageMaker for remote sensing applications and suggest potential future research directions. Our code is open-sourced at https://shorturl.at/hcjmq.