ARENA: Active Region attENtion Aggregation for interpretable solar flare prediction

In this work, we develop, for the first time, a supervised classification framework with class-dependent rewards (CDR) to predict $\geq$MM flares within 24 hr. We construct multiple datasets, covering knowledge-informed features and line-of sight (LOS) magnetograms. We also apply three deep learning models (CNN, CNN-BiLSTM, and Transformer) and three CDR counterparts (CDR-CNN, CDR-CNN-BiLSTM, and CDR-Transformer). First, we analyze the importance of LOS magnetic field parameters with the Transformer, then compare its performance using LOS-only, vector-only, and combined magnetic field parameters. Second, we compare flare prediction performance based on CDR models versus deep learning counterparts. Third, we perform sensitivity analysis on reward engineering for CDR models. Fourth, we use the SHAP method for model interpretability. Finally, we conduct performance comparison between our models and NASA/CCMC. The main findings are: (1)Among LOS feature combinations, R_VALUE and AREA_ACR consistently yield the best results. (2)Transformer achieves better performance with combined LOS and vector magnetic field data than with either alone. (3)Models using knowledge-informed features outperform those using magnetograms. (4)While CNN and CNN-BiLSTM outperform their CDR counterparts on magnetograms, CDR-Transformer is slightly superior to its deep learning counterpart when using knowledge-informed features. Among all models, CDR-Transformer achieves the best performance. (5)The predictive performance of the CDR models is not overly sensitive to the reward choices.(6)Through SHAP analysis, the CDR model tends to regard TOTUSJH as more important, while the Transformer tends to prioritize R_VALUE more.(7)Under identical prediction time and active region (AR) number, the CDR-Transformer shows superior predictive capabilities compared to NASA/CCMC.

Solar eruptions, including flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), have a significant impact on Earth. Some flares are associated with CMEs, and some flares are not. The association between flares and CMEs is not always obvious. In this study, we propose a new deep learning method, specifically a hybrid neural network (HNN) that combines a vision transformer with long short-term memory, to predict associations between flares and CMEs. HNN finds spatio-temporal patterns in the time series of line-of-sight magnetograms of solar active regions (ARs) collected by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory and uses the patterns to predict whether a flare projected to occur within the next 24 hours will be eruptive (i.e., CME-associated) or confined (i.e., not CME-associated). Our experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the HNN method. Furthermore, the results show that magnetic flux cancellation in polarity inversion line regions may well play a role in triggering flare-associated CMEs, a finding consistent with literature.

We present FlareEUV, a multimodal deep learning framework for predicting daily extreme ultraviolet (EUV) irradiance at 6.5 nm over three consecutive days during significant solar flares, using multi-instrument observations from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). We consider 33 significant flares in the period between 2011 and 2014 in Solar Cycle 24. The SDO observations include 13 co-aligned full-disk images, comprising eight AIA EUV/UV and five HMI magnetic/continuum products. FlareEUV learns the relationship between magnetic structure and coronal emission from the raw imaging data using a lightweight attention-based architecture. Our experimental results demonstrate the good performance of FlareEUV in short-term EUV irradiance forecasting during the significant flares and its superiority over baseline methods.