2021/12/16 by Bernard Benson, Benson, Bernard, Edward Brown +17
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Ionosphere and magnetosphere dynamics #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Solar and Space Plasma Dynamics #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) #Spacecraft Design and Technology
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2112.09051
openalex publication_date 2021/12/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Solar radio flux along with geomagnetic indices are important indicators of solar activity and its effects. Extreme solar events such as flares and geomagnetic storms can negatively affect the space environment including satellites in low-Earth orbit. Therefore, forecasting these space weather indices is of great importance in space operations and science. In this study, we propose a model based on long short-term memory neural networks to learn the distribution of time series data with the capability to provide a simultaneous multivariate 27-day forecast of the space weather indices using time series as well as solar image data. We show a 30-40% improvement of the root mean-square error while including solar image data with time series data compared to using time series data alone. Simple baselines such as a persistence and running average forecasts are also compared with the trained deep neural network models. We also quantify the uncertainty in our prediction using a model ensemble.