Content area
Abstract
The AE index has two components: one driven by the solar wind and one related to the magnetotail unloading process. We recall some past findings on this issue and present a new ANN algorithm for the AE forecasting at 5 and 60 min time scales, built by adding to a previous algorithm a further layer with a hyperbolic tangent transfer function and two more inputs, the output at time t and the difference between the input at time t and the output at time t - 1. We show that, at the 60 min time scale and for AE > 400 nT, the new algorithm performs better than the former one, while no improvement is obtained at the 5 min time scale. This result confirms that the AE component driven by the solar wind can be forecast, at least partially, while the unloading component may not be reproduced from solar wind inputs. (PUBLICATION ABSTRACT)