An Interpretable Machine Learning Approach to Understanding the Relationships between Solar Flares and Source Active Regions

Solar flares are defined as outbursts on the surface of the Sun. They occur when energy accumulated in magnetic fields enclosing solar active regions (ARs) is abruptly expelled. Solar flares and associated coronal mass ejections are sources of space weather that adversely impact devices at or near Earth, including the obstruction of high-frequency radio waves utilized for communication and the deterioration of power grid operations. Tracking and delivering early and precise predictions of solar flares is essential for readiness and catastrophe risk mitigation. This paper employs the random forest (RF) model to address the binary classification task, analyzing the links between solar flares and their originating ARs with observational data gathered from 2011 to 2021 by SolarMonitor.org and the XRT flare database. We seek to identify the physical features of a source AR that significantly influence its potential to trigger >=C-class flares. We found that the features of AR_Type_Today, Hale_Class_Yesterday are the most and the least prepotent features, respectively. NoS_Difference has a remarkable effect in decision-making in both global and local interpretations.

Prediction of Geoeffective CMEs Using SOHO Images and Deep Learning

The application of machine learning to the study of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and their impacts on Earth has seen significant growth recently. Understanding and forecasting CME geoeffectiveness is crucial for protecting infrastructure in space and ensuring the resilience of technological systems on Earth. Here we present GeoCME, a deep-learning framework designed to predict, deterministically or probabilistically, whether a CME event that arrives at Earth will cause a geomagnetic storm. A geomagnetic storm is defined as a disturbance of the Earth's magnetosphere during which the minimum Dst index value is less than -50 nT. GeoCME is trained on observations from the instruments including LASCO C2, EIT and MDI on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), focusing on a dataset that includes 136 halo/partial halo CMEs in Solar Cycle 23. Using ensemble and transfer learning techniques, GeoCME is capable of extracting features hidden in the SOHO observations and making predictions based on the learned features. Our experimental results demonstrate the good performance of GeoCME, achieving a Matthew's correlation coefficient of 0.807 and a true skill statistics score of 0.714 when the tool is used as a deterministic prediction model. When the tool is used as a probabilistic forecasting model, it achieves a Brier score of 0.094 and a Brier skill score of 0.493. These results are promising, showing that the proposed GeoCME can help enhance our understanding of CME-triggered solar-terrestrial interactions.

Prediction of the SYM-H Index Using a Bayesian Deep Learning Method with Uncertainty Quantification

We propose a novel deep learning framework, named SYMHnet, which employs a graph neural network and a bidirectional long short-term memory network to cooperatively learn patterns from solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field parameters for short-term forecasts of the SYM-H index based on 1-minute and 5-minute resolution data. SYMHnet takes, as input, the time series of the parameters' values provided by NASA's Space Science Data Coordinated Archive and predicts, as output, the SYM-H index value at time point t + w hours for a given time point t where w is 1 or 2. By incorporating Bayesian inference into the learning framework, SYMHnet can quantify both aleatoric (data) uncertainty and epistemic (model) uncertainty when predicting future SYM-H indices. Experimental results show that SYMHnet works well at quiet time and storm time, for both 1-minute and 5-minute resolution data. The results also show that SYMHnet generally performs better than related machine learning methods. For example, SYMHnet achieves a forecast skill score (FSS) of 0.343 compared to the FSS of 0.074 of a recent gradient boosting machine (GBM) method when predicting SYM-H indices (1 hour in advance) in a large storm (SYM-H = -393 nT) using 5-minute resolution data. When predicting the SYM-H indices (2 hours in advance) in the large storm, SYMHnet achieves an FSS of 0.553 compared to the FSS of 0.087 of the GBM method. In addition, SYMHnet can provide results for both data and model uncertainty quantification, whereas the related methods cannot.

Estimating Coronal Mass Ejection Mass and Kinetic Energy by Fusion of Multiple Deep-learning Models

Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are massive solar eruptions, which have a significant impact on Earth. In this paper, we propose a new method, called DeepCME, to estimate two properties of CMEs, namely, CME mass and kinetic energy. Being able to estimate these properties helps better understand CME dynamics. Our study is based on the CME catalog maintained at the Coordinated Data Analysis Workshops (CDAW) Data Center, which contains all CMEs manually identified since 1996 using the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). We use LASCO C2 data in the period between January 1996 and December 2020 to train, validate and test DeepCME through 10-fold cross validation. The DeepCME method is a fusion of three deep learning models, including ResNet, InceptionNet, and InceptionResNet. Our fusion model extracts features from LASCO C2 images, effectively combining the learning capabilities of the three component models to jointly estimate the mass and kinetic energy of CMEs. Experimental results show that the fusion model yields a mean relative error (MRE) of 0.013 (0.009, respectively) compared to the MRE of 0.019 (0.017, respectively) of the best component model InceptionResNet (InceptionNet, respectively) in estimating the CME mass (kinetic energy, respectively). To our knowledge, this is the first time that deep learning has been used for CME mass and kinetic energy estimations.