Technical Article

A modeling study of ≥2 MeV electron fluxes in GEO at different prediction time scales based on LSTM and transformer networks

¹ State Key Laboratory of Space Weather, National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100190 Beijing, China
² GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, 14473 Potsdam, Germany
³ University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 101499 Beijing, China
⁴ System Research Institute, Deep Space Exploration Lab, 100043 Beijing, China
⁵ Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, University of California, 138307 Los Angeles, CA, USA
⁶ Institute of Physics and Astronomy, University of Potsdam, 14469 Potsdam, Germany
⁷ Shandong Institute of Advanced Technology, 250100 Jinan, China

^* Corresponding author: linrl@nssc.ac.cn

Received: 16 October 2023
Accepted: 10 June 2024

Abstract

In this study, we develop models to predict the log₁₀ of ≥2 MeV electron fluxes with 5-minute resolution at the geostationary orbit using the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and transformer neural networks for the next 1-hour, 3-hour, 6-hour, 12-hour, and 1-day predictions. The data of the GOES-10 satellite from 2002 to 2003 are the training set, the data in 2004 are the validation set, and the data in 2005 are the test set. For different prediction time scales, different input combinations with 4 days as best offset time are tested and it is found that the transformer models perform better than the LSTM models, especially for higher flux values. The best combinations for the transformer models for next 1-hour, 3-hour, 6-hour, 12-hour, 1-day predictions are (log₁₀ Flux, MLT), (log₁₀ Flux, Bt, AE, SYM-H), (log₁₀ Flux, N), (log₁₀ Flux, N, Dst, Lm), and (log₁₀ Flux, Pd, AE) with PE values of 0.940, 0.886, 0.828, 0.747, and 0.660 in 2005, respectively. When the low flux outliers of the ≥2 MeV electron fluxes are excluded, the prediction efficiency (PE) values for the 1-hour and 3-hour predictions increase to 0.958 and 0.900. By evaluating the prediction of ≥2 MeV electron daily and hourly fluences, the PE values of our transformer models are 0.857 and 0.961, respectively, higher than those of previous models. In addition, our models can be used to fill the data gaps of ≥2 MeV electron fluxes.