Search for: All records

The geospace environment is volatile and highly driven. Space weather has effects on Earth's magnetosphere that cause a dynamic and enigmatic response in the thermosphere, particularly on the evolution of neutral mass density. Many models exist that use space weather drivers to produce a density response, but these models are typically computationally expensive or inaccurate for certain space weather conditions. In response, this work aims to employ a probabilistic machine learning (ML) method to create an efficient surrogate for the Thermosphere Ionosphere Electrodynamics General Circulation Model (TIE‐GCM), a physics‐based thermosphere model. Our method leverages principal component analysis to reduce the dimensionality of TIE‐GCM and recurrent neural networks to model the dynamic behavior of the thermosphere much quicker than the numerical model. The newly developed reduced order probabilistic emulator (ROPE) uses Long‐Short Term Memory neural networks to perform time‐series forecasting in the reduced state and provide distributions for future density. We show that across the available data, TIE‐GCM ROPE has similar error to previous linear approaches while improving storm‐time modeling. We also conduct a satellite propagation study for the significant November 2003 storm which shows that TIE‐GCM ROPE can capture the position resulting from TIE‐GCM density with <5 km bias. Simultaneously, linear approaches provide point estimates that can result in biases of 7–18 km.

Machine learning (ML) has been applied to space weather problems with increasing frequency in recent years, driven by an influx of in-situ measurements and a desire to improve modeling and forecasting capabilities throughout the field. Space weather originates from solar perturbations and is comprised of the resulting complex variations they cause within the numerous systems between the Sun and Earth. These systems are often tightly coupled and not well understood. This creates a need for skillful models with knowledge about the confidence of their predictions. One example of such a dynamical system highly impacted by space weather is the thermosphere, the neutral region of Earth’s upper atmosphere. Our inability to forecast it has severe repercussions in the context of satellite drag and computation of probability of collision between two space objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) for decision making in space operations. Even with (assumed) perfect forecast of model drivers, our incomplete knowledge of the system results in often inaccurate thermospheric neutral mass density predictions. Continuing efforts are being made to improve model accuracy, but density models rarely provide estimates of confidence in predictions. In this work, we propose two techniques to develop nonlinear ML regression models to predict thermospheric density while providing robust and reliable uncertainty estimates: Monte Carlo (MC) dropout and direct prediction of the probability distribution, both using the negative logarithm of predictive density (NLPD) loss function. We show the performance capabilities for models trained on both local and global datasets. We show that the NLPD loss provides similar results for both techniques but the direct probability distribution prediction method has a much lower computational cost. For the global model regressed on the Space Environment Technologies High Accuracy Satellite Drag Model (HASDM) density database, we achieve errors of approximately 11% on independent test data with well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. Using an in-situ CHAllenging Minisatellite Payload (CHAMP) density dataset, models developed using both techniques provide test error on the order of 13%. The CHAMP models—on validation and test data—are within 2% of perfect calibration for the twenty prediction intervals tested. We show that this model can also be used to obtain global density predictions with uncertainties at a given epoch.

The Mass Spectrometer and Incoherent Scatter radar (MSIS) model family has been developed and improved since the early 1970's. The most recent version of MSIS is the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) MSIS 2.0 empirical atmospheric model. NRLMSIS 2.0 provides species density, mass density, and temperature estimates as function of location and space weather conditions. MSIS models have long been a popular choice of thermosphere model in the research and operations community alike, but—like many models—does not provide uncertainty estimates. In this work, we develop an exospheric temperature model based in machine learning that can be used with NRLMSIS 2.0 to calibrate it relative to high‐fidelity satellite density estimates directly through the exospheric temperature parameter. Instead of providing point estimates, our model (called MSIS‐UQ) outputs a distribution which is assessed using a metric called the calibration error score. We show that MSIS‐UQ debiases NRLMSIS 2.0 resulting in reduced differences between model and satellite density of 25% and is 11% closer to satellite density than the Space Force's High Accuracy Satellite Drag Model. We also show the model's uncertainty estimation capabilities by generating altitude profiles for species density, mass density, and temperature. This explicitly demonstrates how exospheric temperature probabilities affect density and temperature profiles within NRLMSIS 2.0. Another study displays improved post‐storm overcooling capabilities relative to NRLMSIS 2.0 alone, enhancing the phenomena that it can capture.

Machine learning (ML) models are universal function approximators and—if used correctly—can summarize the information content of observational data sets in a functional form for scientific and engineering applications. A benefit to ML over parametric models is that there are no a priori assumptions about particular basis functions which can potentially limit the phenomena that can be modeled. In this work, we develop ML models on three data sets: the Space Environment Technologies High Accuracy Satellite Drag Model (HASDM) density database, a spatiotemporally matched data set of outputs from the Jacchia‐Bowman 2008 Empirical Thermospheric Density Model (JB2008), and an accelerometer‐derived density data set from CHAllenging Minisatellite Payload (CHAMP). These ML models are compared to the Naval Research Laboratory Mass Spectrometer and Incoherent Scatter radar (NRLMSIS 2.0) model to study the presence of post‐storm cooling in the middle‐thermosphere. We find that both NRLMSIS 2.0 and JB2008‐ML do not account for post‐storm cooling and consequently perform poorly in periods following strong geomagnetic storms (e.g., the 2003 Halloween storms). Conversely, HASDM‐ML and CHAMP‐ML do show evidence of post‐storm cooling indicating that this phenomenon is present in the original data sets. Results show that density reductions up to 40% can occur 1–3 days post‐storm depending on the location and strength of the storm.