Seasonality-Aware Hybrid Convolutional Transformer for Antarctic Sea Ice Forecasting

Antarctic sea ice concentration (SIC) forecasting is an important yet challenging task due to the coexistence of complex spatial structure, long-range temporal dependencies, and strong seasonal variability. Conventional convolution-based models are effective at capturing local spatial patterns, but often have limited ability to model long-term temporal evolution. To address these challenges, we build on a hybrid convolutional transformer forecasting framework for monthly Antarctic SIC forecasting. This framework combines convolutional encoding for spatial feature extraction with space-time factorised self-attention for SIC modelling. We further introduce two season-based mechanisms: a month-aware positional encoding that injects calendar-month information into the token representation, and a seasonal temporal bias that encourages attention to periodically related historical states. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves better performance than convolutional and recurrent baselines as well as ECMWF's physics-based dynamical model SEAS5 under both classification and regression metrics. Ablation studies further indicate that the seasonality-aware components provide consistent additional gains in both short- and long-horizon prediction. These results demonstrate the value of combining convolutional structures, attention mechanisms, and periodic prior information for Antarctic SIC forecasting.