NEURAL NETWORK-BASED PREDICTION MODEL
FOR THE DYNAMICS OF THE IONOSPHERIC EQUATORIAL ANOMALY
USING THE TOTAL ELECTRONIC CONTENT
In this paper we present the prediction model for the dynamics of the ionospheric equatorial anomaly that is based on the use of the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). The prediction model was developed by using global maps of the ionosphere Total Electronic Content (TEC) for the period from 2001 to 2018. We show that in case of correct data centering and elimination of diurnal and seasonal factors, the equatorial anomaly makes major contribution to the variance of fluctuations in the TEC data. We applied several neural network-based prediction models that were trained independently for each component of the decomposition. The approach based on a hybrid model consisting of a convolution network and a network with long short-term memory with preanalysis of the principal components reduced the prediction error of TEC maps by 2 hours. The prediction error of this model was 4 times less than the error of the linear regression model.