Ionospheric Response on Solar Flares through Machine Learning Modeling

Abstract

Following solar flares (SF), the abrupt increase in X-radiation and EUV emission generates additional ionization and higher absorption of, e.g., electromagnetic waves in the sunlit hemisphere of the Earth’s ionosphere. The modeling of the ionosphere under solar flares are motivated by new observations with spacecrafts, satellites, and ground-based measurements. The estimation of modeling parameters for the ionospheric D-region during SF events poses a significant challenge, typically requiring a trial-and-error approach. This research presents a machine learning (ML) methodology for modeling the sharpness (β) and reflection height (H′) during SF events occurred from 2008 to 2017. The research methodology was divided into two separate approaches: an instance-based approach, which involved obtaining SF parameters during the peak SF, and a time-series approach, which involved analyzing time-series data during SFs. The findings of the study revealed that the model for the instance-based approach exhibited mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) values of 9.1% for the β parameter and 2.45% for the H′ parameter. The findings from the time-series approach indicated that the model exhibited lower error rates compared to the instance-based approach. However, it was observed that the model demonstrated an increase in β residuals as the predicted β increased, whereas the opposite trend was observed for the H′ parameter. The main goal of the research is to develop an easy-to-use method that provides ionospheric parameters utilizing ML, which can be refined with additional and novel data as well as other techniques for data pre-processing and other algorithms. The proposed method and the utilized workflow and datasets are available at GitHub.