English

Transformer-based Atmospheric Density Forecasting

Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics 2023-10-27 v1 Machine Learning Space Physics

Abstract

As the peak of the solar cycle approaches in 2025 and the ability of a single geomagnetic storm to significantly alter the orbit of Resident Space Objects (RSOs), techniques for atmospheric density forecasting are vital for space situational awareness. While linear data-driven methods, such as dynamic mode decomposition with control (DMDc), have been used previously for forecasting atmospheric density, deep learning-based forecasting has the ability to capture nonlinearities in data. By learning multiple layer weights from historical atmospheric density data, long-term dependencies in the dataset are captured in the mapping between the current atmospheric density state and control input to the atmospheric density state at the next timestep. This work improves upon previous linear propagation methods for atmospheric density forecasting, by developing a nonlinear transformer-based architecture for atmospheric density forecasting. Empirical NRLMSISE-00 and JB2008, as well as physics-based TIEGCM atmospheric density models are compared for forecasting with DMDc and with the transformer-based propagator.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.16912,
  title  = {Transformer-based Atmospheric Density Forecasting},
  author = {Julia Briden and Peng Mun Siew and Victor Rodriguez-Fernandez and Richard Linares},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.16912},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Conference: 24th Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies At: Maui, Hawaii, United States

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:02:00.864Z