Spatiotemporal Analysis of Regional Ionospheric TEC Prediction Using Multi-Factor NeuralProphet Model under Disturbed Conditions

The ionospheric total electron content (TEC) is susceptible to factors, such as solar and geomagnetic activities, resulting in the enhancement of its non-stationarity and nonlinear characteristics, which aggravate the impact on radio communications. In this study, based on the NeuralProphet hybrid prediction framework, a regional ionospheric TEC prediction model (multi-factor NeuralProphet model, MF-NPM) considering multiple factors was constructed by taking solar activity index, geomagnetic activity index, geographic coordinates, and IGS GIM data as input parameters. Data from 2009 to 2013 were used to train the model to achieve forecasts of regional ionospheric TEC at different latitudes during the solar maximum phase (2014) and geomagnetic storms by sliding 1 day. In order to verify the prediction performance of the MF-NPM, the multi-factor long short-term memory neural network (LSTMNN) model was also constructed for comparative analysis. At the same time, the TEC prediction results of the two models were compared with the IGS GIM and CODE 1-day predicted GIM products (COPG_P1). The results show that the MF-NPM achieves good prediction performance effectively. The RMSE and relative accuracy (RA) of MF-NPM are 2.33 TECU and 93.75%, respectively, which are 0.77 and 1.87 TECU and 1.91% and 6.68% better than LSTMNN and COPG_P1 in the solar maximum phase (2014). During the geomagnetic storm, the RMSE and RA of TEC prediction results based on the MF-NPM are 3.12 TECU and 92.86%, respectively, which are improved by 1.25 and 2.30 TECU and 2.38% and 7.24% compared with LSTMNN and COPG_P1. Furthermore, the MF-NPM also achieves better performance in low–mid latitudes.