Machine Learning Recognition and Phase Velocity Estimation of Atmospheric Gravity Waves from OI 557.7 nm All-Sky Airglow Images

Abstract

Atmospheric gravity waves (AGWs) are treated as density structure perturbations of the atmosphere and play an important role in atmospheric dynamics. Utilizing All-Sky Airglow Imagers (ASAIs) with OI-Filter 557.7 nm, AGW phase velocity and propagation direction were extracted using classified images by visual inspection, where airglow images were collected from the OMTI network at Shigaraki (34.85 E, 134.11 N) from October 1998 to October 2002. Nonetheless, a large dataset of airglow images are processed and classified for studying AGW seasonal variation in the middle atmosphere. In this article, a machine learning-based approach for image recognition of AGWs from ASAIs is suggested. Consequently, three convolutional neural networks (CNNs), namely AlexNet, GoogLeNet, and ResNet-50, are considered. Out of 13,201 deviated images, 1192 very weak/unclear AGW signatures were eliminated during the quality control process. All networks were trained and tested by 12,007 classified images which approximately cover the maximum solar cycle during the time-period mentioned above. In the testing phase, AlexNet achieved the highest accuracy of 98.41%. Consequently, estimation of AGW zonal and meridional phase velocities in the mesosphere region by a cascade forward neural network (CFNN) is presented. The CFNN was trained and tested based on AGW and neutral wind data. AGW data were extracted from the classified AGW images by event and spectral methods, where wind data were extracted from the Horizontal Wind Model (HWM) as well as the middle and upper atmosphere radar in Shigaraki. As a result, the estimated phase velocities were determined with correlation coefficient (R) above 0.89 in all training and testing phases. Finally, a comparison with the existing studies confirms the accuracy of our proposed approaches in addition to AGW velocity forecasting.