Investigation of the Relation Between Magnetospheric Activity and Solar
Wind Parameters Based on Potential Learning
Abstract
Nowadays, it is so important in saving our economic activity and evading
the disasters caused by terrestrial electromagnetic effects to predict
both temporal and spatial scales of the geomagnetic disturbances based
on in-situ solar wind observations. Recently, Neural Network (NN) is one
of the notable techniques for the predictions of the magnetospheric
activities. However, NN has a problem referred to as ‘black box’, which
is difficult to extract which solar wind parameters are the most
important for prediction. In this study, we examine a significant
relationship between Kp index, which represents the magnetospheric
activity, and the solar wind conditions based on an interpretable neural
network: ‘Potential Learning (PL)’. A feature of the PL is to make a
network that can understand the input variables by learning the “input
potentialities”, which are indices calculated using the variances of
the solar wind parameters as input variables. In this study, we
investigate the magnetospheric activity profile when the Interplanetary
Magnetic Field (IMF) oriented southward (Bz < 0). As the input
solar wind data, we utilize the two components of the magnetic field
(Bx, By) in GSE, and solar wind flow speed, and number density during 20
years between 1999 and 2018. Furthermore, we divide the associated
values of Kp into two groups (targets): ‘Kp = 6- to 9 (positive target)’
and ‘Kp = 0 to 1+ (negative target)’. Because the data number of
positive target was smaller than that of negative target, the negative
target samples are randomly selected so that the data numbers of both
targets become equal. Based on the PL neural network, we obtain two
important results; 1) the solar wind plasma flow speed might have the
most influential in the increase of the Kp index, and 2) as the
secondary influential parameter for the Kp increase, the solar wind
proton density is considered. In the presentation, we will discuss
feasibility of the application to the prediction of the magnetospheric
activity based on the solar wind parameters.