Joint Geoeffectiveness and Arrival Time Prediction of CMEs by a Unified Deep Learning Framework

Fast and accurate prediction of the geoeffectiveness of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and the arrival time of the geoeffective CMEs is urgent, to reduce the harm caused by CMEs. In this paper, we present a new deep learning framework based on time series of satellites’ optical observations that can give both the geoeffectiveness and the arrival time prediction of the CME events. It is the first time combining these two demands in a unified deep learning framework with no requirement of manually feature selection and get results immediately. The only input of the deep learning framework is the time series images from synchronized solar white-light and EUV observations. Our framework first uses the deep residual network embedded with the attention mechanism to extract feature maps for each observation image, then fuses the feature map of each image by the feature map fusion module and determines the geoeffectiveness of CME events. For the geoeffective CME events, we further predict its arrival time by the deep residual regression network based on group convolution. In order to train and evaluate our proposed framework, we collect 2400 partial-/full-halo CME events and its corresponding images from 1996 to 2018. The F1 score and Accuracy of the geoeffectiveness prediction can reach 0.270% and 75.1%, respectively, and the mean absolute error of the arrival time prediction is only 5.8 h, which are both significantly better than well-known deep learning methods and can be comparable to, or even better than, the best performance of traditional methods.