Ionospheric vertical total electron content prediction model in low-latitude regions based on long short-term memory neural network

Ionosphere delay is one of the main sources of noise affecting global navigation satellite systems, operation of radio detection and ranging systems and very-long-baseline-interferometry. One of the most important and common methods to reduce this phase delay is to establish accurate nowcasting and forecasting ionospheric total electron content models. For forecasting models, compared to mid-to-high latitudes, at low latitudes, an active ionosphere leads to extreme differences between long-term prediction models and the actual state of the ionosphere. To solve the problem of low accuracy for long-term prediction models at low latitudes, this article provides a low-latitude, long-term ionospheric prediction model based on a multi-input-multi-output, long-short-term memory neural network. To verify the feasibility of the model, we first made predictions of the vertical total electron content data 24 and 48 hours in advance for each day of July 2020 and then compared both the predictions corresponding to a given day, for all days. Furthermore, in the model modification part, we selected historical data from June 2020 for the validation set, determined a large offset from the results that were predicted to be active, and used the ratio of the mean absolute error of the detected results to that of the predicted results as a correction coefficient to modify our multi-input-multi-output long short-term memory model. The average root mean square error of the 24-hour-advance predictions of our modified model was 4.4 TECU, which was lower and better than5.1 TECU of the multi-input-multi-output, long short-term memory model and 5.9 TECU of the IRI-2016 model.

An artificial neural network model in predicting VTEC over central Anatolia in Turkey

This research investigates the capability of artificial neural networks to predict vertical total electron content(VTEC)over central Anatolia in Turkey.The VTEC dataset was derived from the 19 permanent Global Positioning System(GPS)stations belonging to the Turkish National Permanent GPS NetworkActive(TUSAGA-Aktif)and International Global Navigation Satellite System Service(IGS)networks.The study area is located at 32.6°E-37.5°E and 36.0°N-42.0°N.Considering the factors inducing VTEC variations in the ionosphere,an artificial neural network(NN)with seven input neurons in a multi-layer perceptron model is proposed.The KURU and ANMU GPS stations from the TUSAGA-Aktif network are selected to implement the proposed neural network model.Based on the root mean square error(RMSE)results from 50 simulation tests,the hidden layer in the NN model is designed with 41 neurons since the lowest RMSE is achieved in this attempt.According to the correlation coefficients,absolute and relative errors,the NN VTEC provides better predictions for hourly and quarterly GPS VTEC.In addition,this paper demonstrates that the NN VTEC model shows better performance than the global IRI2016 model.Regarding the spatial contribution of the GPS network to TEC prediction,the KURU station performs better than ANMU station in fitting with the proposed NN model in the station-based comparison.