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Record W4406122706 · doi:10.1029/2024sw003928

Understanding and Modeling the Dynamics of Storm‐Time Atmospheric Neutral Density Using Random Forests

2025· article· en· W4406122706 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueSpace Weather · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPhysics and Astronomy
TopicIonosphere and magnetosphere dynamics
Canadian institutionsLakehead University
FundersScience and Technology Facilities Council
KeywordsStormEnvironmental scienceAtmospheric sciencesMeteorologyStatistical physicsPhysics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Atmospheric neutral density is a crucial component to accurately predict and track the motion of satellites. During periods of elevated solar and geomagnetic activity atmospheric neutral density becomes highly variable and dynamic. This variability and enhanced dynamics make it difficult to accurately model neutral density leading to increased errors which propagate from neutral density models through to orbit propagation models. In this paper we investigate the dynamics of neutral density during geomagnetic storms. We use a combination of solar and geomagnetic variables to develop three Random Forest machine learning models of neutral density. These models are based on (a) slow solar indices, (b) high cadence solar irradiance, and (c) combined high‐cadence solar irradiance and geomagnetic indices. Each model is validated using an out‐of‐sample data set using analysis of residuals and typical metrics. During quiet‐times, all three models perform well; however, during geomagnetic storms, the combined high cadence solar iradiance/geomagnetic model performs significantly better than the models based solely on solar activity. The combined model capturing an additional 10% in the variability of density and having an error up to six times smaller during geomagnetic storms then the solar models. Overall, this work demonstrates the importance of including geomagnetic activity in the modeling of atmospheric density and serves as a proof of concept for using machine learning algorithms to model, and in the future forecast atmospheric density for operational use.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.666
Threshold uncertainty score0.469

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.017
GPT teacher head0.233
Teacher spread0.216 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it