Abstract
Geomagnetic disturbance forecasting is based on the identification of solar wind structures and accurate determination of their magnetic field orientation. For nowcasting activities, this is currently a tedious and manual process. Focusing on the main driver of geomagnetic disturbances, the twisted internal magnetic field of interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs), we explore a convolutional neural network’s (CNN) ability to predict the embedded magnetic flux rope’s orientation once it has been identified from in situ solar wind observations. Our work uses CNNs trained with magnetic field vectors from analytical flux rope data. The simulated flux ropes span many possible spacecraft trajectories and flux rope orientations. We train CNNs first with full duration flux ropes and then again with partial duration flux ropes. The former provides us with a baseline of how well CNNs can predict flux rope orientation while the latter provides insights into real-time forecasting by exploring how accuracy is affected by percentage of flux rope observed. The process of casting the physics problem as a machine learning problem is discussed as well as the impacts of different factors on prediction accuracy such as flux rope fluctuations and different neural network topologies. Finally, results from evaluating the trained network against observed ICMEs from Wind during 1995–2015 are presented.
Highlights
Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are one of many manifestations of our dynamic Sun
Our experiments have demonstrated that convolutional neural networks are capable of providing extremely reliable characterizations of flux ropes from synthetic data
A trained network can use the structure of simulated magnetic field vectors to learn filters that map to accurate flux rope key parameter predictions; successfully inferring large scale, 3D information from single-point measurements
Summary
Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are one of many manifestations of our dynamic Sun. CMEs are responsible for the transport of large quantities of solar mass into the interplanetary medium at very high speeds and in various directions. CMEs are commonly referred to as interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs) after leaving the solar atmosphere and reaching the interplanetary medium. In situ observations of ICMEs frequently find them to have a combination of an increase in magnetic field strength, low proton plasma temperature, βplasma below 1, and monotonic rotation of the magnetic field components (Burlaga, 1988). These characteristics are commonly referred to as a Magnetic Cloud (MC) (Burlaga et al, 1981; Klein and Burlaga, 1982). Not all ICMEs show the signatures of an internal structure characterized by a flux rope, perhaps resulting from changes during interplanetary evolution (Jian et al, 2006; Manchester et al, 2017). Flux ropes are sufficiently prevalent that they can aid in
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