RoggersWaibi/east-africa-vtec-swt

PhD research: CNN-BiLSTM-Attention model for 24-hour ionospheric VTEC forecasting over East Africa + Space Weather Early Warning Tool (SWT) # East Africa Ionospheric VTEC Forecasting and Space Weather Early Warning Tool **PhD Research — Busitema University, Department of Physics** > *Development of a Predictive Ionospheric VTEC Model for East Africa to Forecast Space Weather Events* Funded by the **Space Weather Based Early Warning Tool Project Research Grant** (Ref: BU-STI-OP/2023/AERONAUTICS AND SPACE/03), Science, Technology and Innovation — Office of the President (STI-OP), Uganda. --- ## Overview This repository contains the full research codebase and article drafts for a three-paper PhD series developing a 24-hour-ahead ionospheric Vertical Total Electron Content (VTEC) forecasting model for East Africa and an operational Space Weather Early Warning Tool (SWT). The East African ionosphere is uniquely dynamic, dominated by the **Equatorial Ionization Anomaly (EIA)**, Post-Reversal Enhancement (PRE) of plasma drift, and prompt-penetration electric fields during geomagnetic storms. These conditions degrade GNSS positioning, HF radio communications, precision agriculture, and aviation — yet no regionally tailored space weather alert service currently exists for the East African sector. --- ## Research Articles ### Article 1 — CNN-BiLSTM-Attention Forecasting Model **Title:** *A CNN-BiLSTM-Attention Model for 24-Hour-Ahead Ionospheric VTEC Forecasting over East Africa* - Develops and validates a Convolutional Bidirectional LSTM with multi-head Attention on East African GNSS observations (2012–2020) - Input: 72-hour gridded VTEC history + 6 space weather indices (F10.7, SSN, Kp, Dst, IMF Bz, Ey) - Output: 24-hour-ahead gridded VTEC maps (33×19 grid, 1°×1°, 26°–46°E, 14°S–17°N) - Monte Carlo Dropout uncertainty estimation (50 forward passes) - RMSE = 2.8 TECU; outperforms IRI-2016 (11.82 TECU), CODE GIM (3.65 TECU), climatology (11.19 TECU), and persistence - Source: `Articles/Article1/main.tex` ### Article 2 — Storm-Time VTEC Morphology **Title:** *Geomagnetic Storm Effects on the East Afric …