Convolutional Neural Networks for Automated ULF Wave Classification in Swarm Time Series

Ultra-low frequency (ULF) magnetospheric plasma waves play a key role in the dynamics of the Earth’s magnetosphere and, therefore, their importance in Space Weather phenomena is indisputable. Magnetic field measurements from recent multi-satellite missions (e.g., Cluster, THEMIS, Van Allen Probes and Swarm) are currently advancing our knowledge on the physics of ULF waves. In particular, Swarm satellites, one of the most successful missions for the study of the near-Earth electromagnetic environment, have contributed to the expansion of data availability in the topside ionosphere, stimulating much recent progress in this area. Coupled with the new successful developments in artificial intelligence (AI), we are now able to use more robust approaches devoted to automated ULF wave event identification and classification. The goal of this effort is to use a popular machine learning method, widely used in Earth Observation domain for classification of satellite images, to solve a Space Physics classification problem, namely to identify ULF wave events using magnetic field data from Swarm. We construct a Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet) that takes as input the wavelet spectrum of the Earth’s magnetic field variations per track, as measured by Swarm, and whose building blocks consist of two alternating convolution and pooling layers, and one fully connected layer, aiming to classify ULF wave events within four different possible signal categories: (1) Pc3 wave events (i.e., frequency range 20–100 MHz), (2) background noise, (3) false positives, and (4) plasma instabilities. Our preliminary experiments show promising results, yielding successful identification of more than 97% accuracy. The same methodology can be easily applied to magnetometer data from other satellite missions and ground-based arrays.