Research Article

Kp forecasting with a recurrent neural network

Center for Space and Atmospheric Research, Space Weather, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, FL 32114-3900, USA

^* Corresponding author: essexton@protonmail.com

Received: 16 June 2018
Accepted: 8 May 2019

Abstract

In an effort to forecast the planetary Kp-index beyond the current 1-hour and 4-hour predictions, a recurrent neural network is trained on three decades of historical data from NASA’s Omni virtual observatory and forecasts Kp with a prediction horizon of up to 24 h. Using Matlab’s neural network toolbox, the multilayer perceptron model is trained on inputs comprised of Kp for a given time step as well as from different sets of the following six solar wind parameters, B_z, n, V, |B|, σ_B and . The purpose of this study was to test which combination of the solar wind and Interplanetary Magnetic Field (IMF) parameters used for training gives the best performance as defined by correlation coefficient, C, between the predicted and actually measured Kp values and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). The model consists of an input layer, a single nonlinear hidden layer with 28 neurons, and a linear output layer that predicts Kp up to 24 h in advance. For 24 h prediction, the network trained on B_z, n, V, |B|, σ_B performs the best giving C in the range from 0.8189 (for 31 predictions) to 0.8211 (for 9 months of predictions), with the smallest RMSE.