No Arabic abstract
We developed a flare prediction model using machine learning, which is optimized to predict the maximum class of flares occurring in the following 24 h. Machine learning is used to devise algorithms that can learn from and make decisions on a huge amount of data. We used solar observation data during the period 2010-2015, such as vector magnetogram, ultraviolet (UV) emission, and soft X-ray emission taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite. We detected active regions from the full-disk magnetogram, from which 60 features were extracted with their time differentials, including magnetic neutral lines, the current helicity, the UV brightening, and the flare history. After standardizing the feature database, we fully shuffled and randomly separated it into two for training and testing. To investigate which algorithm is best for flare prediction, we compared three machine learning algorithms: the support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), and extremely randomized trees (ERT). The prediction score, the true skill statistic (TSS), was higher than 0.9 with a fully shuffled dataset, which is higher than that for human forecasts. It was found that k-NN has the highest performance among the three algorithms. The ranking of the feature importance showed that the previous flare activity is most effective, followed by the length of magnetic neutral lines, the unsigned magnetic flux, the area of UV brightening, and the time differentials of features over 24 h, all of which are strongly correlated with the flux emergence dynamics in an active region.
We introduce a hybrid approach to solar flare prediction, whereby a supervised regularization method is used to realize feature importance and an unsupervised clustering method is used to realize the binary flare/no-flare decision. The approach is validated against NOAA SWPC data.
We developed a solar flare prediction model using a deep neural network (DNN), named Deep Flare Net (DeFN). The model can calculate the probability of flares occurring in the following 24 h in each active region, which is used to determine the most likely maximum classes of flares via a binary classification (e.g., >=M class versus <M class or >=C class versus <C class). From 3x10^5 observation images taken during 2010-2015 by Solar Dynamic Observatory, we automatically detected sunspots and calculated 79 features for each region, to which flare occurrence labels of X-, M-, and C-class were attached. We adopted the features used in Nishizuka et al. (2017) and added some features for operational prediction: coronal hot brightening at 131 A (T>=10^7 K) and the X-ray and 131 A intensity data 1 and 2 h before an image. For operational evaluation, we divided the database into two for training and testing: the dataset in 2010-2014 for training and the one in 2015 for testing. The DeFN model consists of deep multilayer neural networks, formed by adapting skip connections and batch normalizations. To statistically predict flares, the DeFN model was trained to optimize the skill score, i.e., the true skill statistic (TSS). As a result, we succeeded in predicting flares with TSS=0.80 for >=M-class flares and TSS=0.63 for >=C-class flares. Note that in usual DNN models, the prediction process is a black box. However, in the DeFN model, the features are manually selected, and it is possible to analyze which features are effective for prediction after evaluation.
Solar flare prediction plays an important role in understanding and forecasting space weather. The main goal of the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI), one of the instruments on NASAs Solar Dynamics Observatory, is to study the origin of solar variability and characterize the Suns magnetic activity. HMI provides continuous full-disk observations of the solar vector magnetic field with high cadence data that lead to reliable predictive capability; yet, solar flare prediction effort utilizing these data is still limited. In this paper, we present a machine-learning-as-a-service (MLaaS) framework, called DeepSun, for predicting solar flares on the Web based on HMIs data products. Specifically, we construct training data by utilizing the physical parameters provided by the Space-weather HMI Active Region Patches (SHARP) and categorize solar flares into four classes, namely B, C, M, X, according to the X-ray flare catalogs available at the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). Thus, the solar flare prediction problem at hand is essentially a multi-class (i.e., four-class) classification problem. The DeepSun system employs several machine learning algorithms to tackle this multi-class prediction problem and provides an application programming interface (API) for remote programming users. To our knowledge, DeepSun is the first MLaaS tool capable of predicting solar flares through the Internet.
Smooth power generation from solar stations demand accurate, reliable and efficient forecast of solar energy for optimal integration to cater market demand; however, the implicit instability of solar energy production may cause serious problems for the smooth power generation. We report daily prediction of solar energy by exploiting the strength of machine learning techniques to capture and analyze complicated behavior of enormous features effectively. For this purpose, dataset comprising of 98 solar stations has been taken from energy competition of American Meteorological Society (AMS) for predicting daily solar energy. Forecast models of base line regressors including linear, ridge, lasso, decision tree, random forest and artificial neural networks have been implemented on the AMS solar dataset. Grid size is converted into two sections: 16x9 and 10x4 to ascertain attributes contributing more towards the generated power from densely located stations on global ensemble forecast system (GEFS). To evaluate the models, statistical measures of prediction error in terms of RMSE, MAE and R2_score have been analyzed and compared with the existing techniques. It has been observed that improved accuracy is achieved through random forest and ridge regressor for both grid sizes in contrast to all other proposed methods. Stability and reliability of the proposed schemes are evaluated on a single solar station as well as on multiple independent runs.
Determining the electric field (E-field) distribution on the Suns photosphere is essential for quantitative studies of how energy flows from the Suns photosphere, through the corona, and into the heliosphere. This E-field also provides valuable input for data-driven models of the solar atmosphere and the Sun-Earth system. We show how Faradays Law can be used with observed vector magnetogram time series to estimate the photospheric E-field, an ill-posed inversion problem. Our method uses a poloidal-toroidal decomposition (PTD) of the time derivative of the vector magnetic field. The PTD solutions are not unique; the gradient of a scalar potential can be added to the PTD E-field without affecting consistency with Faradays Law. We present an iterative technique to determine a potential function consistent with ideal MHD evolution; but this E-field is also not a unique solution to Faradays Law. Finally, we explore a variational approach that minimizes an energy functional to determine a unique E-field, similar to Longcopes Minimum Energy Fit. The PTD technique, the iterative technique, and the variational technique are used to estimate E-fields from a pair of synthetic vector magnetograms taken from an MHD simulation; and these E-fields are compared with the simulations known electric fields. These three techniques are then applied to a pair of vector magnetograms of solar active region NOAA AR8210, to demonstrate the methods with real data.