An Investigation of Ionospheric TEC Prediction Maps Over China Using Bidirectional Long Short‐Term Memory Method Space Weather

The ionospheric total electron content (TEC) is an important ionospheric parameter, and it is widely utilized in research such as space weather prediction and precise positioning. However, it is still challenging to develop an ionospheric TEC prediction model with high accuracy. In this study, a new ionospheric TEC model over China was developed using the bidirectional long short-term memory (bi-LSTM) method and observations from 257 ground-based global navigation satellite system (GNSS) stations in the Crustal Movement Observation Network of China from January 2018 to December 2021. The root mean square errors of the bi-LSTM-based model’s 1 and 2 hr ahead predictions on the test data set (from June 2021 to December 2021) are 1.12 and 1.68 TECU, respectively, which are 75/50/32% and 72/48/22% smaller than those of the IRI-2016, artificial neural network and LSTM-based models, correspondingly. The bi-LSTM-based model shows the best performance, which is most likely due to the fact that the sequence information in both forward and backward directions is taken into consideration in the new model. In addition, the diurnal variation, seasonal variation of the ionospheric TEC, and variations under geomagnetic storm conditions are successfully captured by the bi-LSTM-based model. Moreover, the TEC maps resulting from the bi-LSTM model agree well with those obtained from the final ionospheric product from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Hence, the new model can be a good choice for the investigation of the spatiotemporal variation trend in the ionosphere and GNSS navigation.