# Forecasting Local Ionospheric Parameters Using Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15093 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15093/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [Temporal Fusion Transformers for Interpretable Multi-horizon Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09363/) (2019)
- [Conformalized Quantile Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03222/) (2019)
- [Beyond Pinball Loss: Quantile Methods for Calibrated Uncertainty Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09588/) (2020)
- [Why ResNet Works? Residuals Generalize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01367/) (2019)
- [Of Quantiles and Expectiles: Consistent Scoring Functions, Choquet Representations, and Forecast Rankings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.08195/) (2015)
- [Deep Learning Enhanced Dynamic Mode Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04433/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a novel method for forecasting key ionospheric parameters using transformer-based neural networks. The model provides accurate forecasts and uncertainty quantification of the F2-layer peak plasma frequency (foF2), the F2-layer peak density height (hmF2), and total electron content (TEC) for a given geographic location. It includes a number of exogenous variables, including F10.7cm solar flux and disturbance storm time (Dst). We demonstrate how transformers can be trained in a data assimilation-like fashion that uses these exogenous variables along with naive predictions from climatology to generate 24-hour forecasts with nonparametric uncertainty bounds. We call this method the Local Ionospheric Forecast Transformer (LIFT). We demonstrate that the trained model can generalize to new geographic locations and time periods not seen during training, and we compare its performance to that of the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) using CCIR coefficients.