Prediction of Magnetic Flux Evolution During Solar Active Region Emergence using Long Short-Term Memory Networks

Solar active regions (ARs) are the primary drivers of space weather events, making their early prediction crucial for operational forecasting systems. We develop machine learning models capable of predicting the evolution of magnetic flux during AR emergence using 1D time series of the continuum intensity and solar oscillation power maps for 53 active regions and their surrounding quiet-Sun areas. Each observable is sampled over a fixed 30.66 • × 30.66 • field of view. These observations capture the temporal evolution of each active region and serve as inputs for training and validation of our MagFluxLSTM and MagFluxEnc-Dec models. The MagFluxLSTM architecture implements a single-stage standard Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) network. MagFluxEnc-Dec represents an LSTM encoder-decoder with teacher forcing. To test and evaluate the models’ performance , we use the continuum intensity and oscillation power maps (calculated for several frequency bands from Doppler velocity) as input to predict the magnetic flux. Among the top 100 hyperparameter configurations ranked by validation derivative RMSE, 98% correspond to MagFluxLSTM, compared to only 2% for MagFluxEnc-Dec. Thus, although the MagFluxEnc-Dec architecture has higher model complexity, it leads to poorer generalization to ARs outside the training set and less stable training than the simpler MagFluxLSTM, which can predict magnetic flux emergence 3–10 hours in advance within a 12-hour prediction window in both experimental and operational-type settings for the 5 testing active regions.