Prediction and variation of the auroral oval boundary based on a deep learning model and space physical parameters

Abstract

The auroral oval boundary represents an important physical process with implications for the ionosphere and magnetosphere. An automatic auroral oval boundary prediction method based on deep learning in this paper is applied to study the variation of the auroral oval boundary associated with different space physical parameters. We construct an auroral oval boundary dataset to train our proposed model, which consists of 184 416 auroral oval boundary points extracted from 3842 images captured by the Ultraviolet Imager (UVI) of the Polar satellite and its corresponding 18 space physical parameters selected from the OMNI dataset from December 1996 to March 1997. Furthermore, several statistical experiments and correlation analysis experiments are performed based on our dataset to explore the relationship between space physical parameters and the location of the auroral oval boundary. The experiment results show that the prediction model based on the deep learning method can estimate the auroral oval boundary efficiently, and different space physical parameters have different effects on the auroral oval boundary, especially the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF), geomagnetic indexes, and solar wind parameters.