Long-term trends at the geomagnetic equator: Data retrieval, time series construction, assessment and forecasting

The space weather environment is dominated by complicated nonlinear interactions from which understanding and estimating their evolution and isolating phenomena can be very challenging. Moreover, several studies have documented the difficulties of analyzing trends in low and equatorial latitudes. For instance, solar proxies appear to have a different predictive power of critical plasma frequency. Furthermore, the secular variations of the geomagnetic field seem to have comparable effects on ionospheric trends as greenhouse cooling. These complexities may require a more comprehensive analysis.
This work describes the construction and assessment of the foF2 time series of ionospheric parameters from the Digisonde Portable Sounder at the Jicamarca Radio Observatory (JRO). After removing the outliers, a seasonal decomposition was done to identify the drivers of the different parameters. Finally, we will apply this pre-processed and clean data set to build a critical frequency forecasting model, and compare the results with other ML available libraries.