A Novel Ionospheric Inversion Model: PINN-SAMI3 (Physics Informed Neural Network Based on SAMI3)

Purely data-driven ionospheric modeling fails to adequately obey fundamental physical laws. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose a novel ionospheric inversion model, Physics-Informed Neural Network based on fully physical models SAMI3 (PINN-SAMI3). The model incorporates the governing equations of the ionospheric physical model SAMI3 into the neural network to reconstruct the temporal-spatial distribution of ionospheric plasma parameters. The objective of this study is to investigate the feasibility of integrating physical models with machine learning for ionospheric modeling. The PINN-SAMI3 framework enforces physical laws through the multiple ion species of continuity, momentum, temperature equations in the magnetic dipole coordinate system. The simulation results show that if sparse ion densities are used as training data, it is possible to retrieve ionospheric electron densities, ion velocities and ion temperatures, respectively. The optimal physical constraints have been also investigated for different inversion quantities. Furthermore, the impact of incorporating E × B velocity terms on inversion results during the periods of ionospheric calm and geomagnetic storm is analyzed. The PINN-SAMI3 achieves good inversion results even using sparse data in comparison to the traditional artificial neural networks (ANN). The framework will contribute to advance the future space weather prediction capability with artificial intelligence (AI).