Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-2025
Department
Michigan Tech Research Institute
Abstract
The F10.7 solar radio flux is a critical quantity for operational space weather nowcasting and forecasting, where it is routinely used as a driver for coupled atmospheric models to estimate a variety of important quantities such as the neutral atmospheric density. Although there have been several successful developments in the way of parametric modeling to ensure F10.7 coverage during outages (often using the sunspot number or radio flux observations at neighboring wavelengths), these developments have refrained from employing comprehensive cross-validation schemes to ensure model generalizability, and can benefit from recently-developed techniques for modeling nonlinear phenomena. We present an approach that uses Feature Ordering by Conditional Independence (FOCI) to identify favorable surrogates for the F10.7 index and combines this with modeling of F10.7 with linear models and Generalized Additive Models (GAMs). We find that this approach offers notable improvements in reconstructing F10.7 over gaps of various lengths, with GAMs yielding mean error of (Formula presented.) 2.8%, compared to polynomial methods that yield mean errors of (Formula presented.) %. We additionally demonstrate the effect of reconstruction error on neutral densities modeled by the NRLMSISE2.0 thermosphere model.
Publication Title
Space Weather
Recommended Citation
Brandt, D.,
Vega, E.,
&
Thelen, B.
(2025).
Robust Statistical Techniques for Operational Maintenance of the 10.7 cm Solar Radio Flux.
Space Weather,
23(5).
http://doi.org/10.1029/2024SW004060
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/michigantech-p2/1699
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Version
Publisher's PDF
Publisher's Statement
© 2025. The Author(s). Publisher’s version of record:
https://doi.org/10.1029/2024SW004060