Article TEC forecasting based on manifold trajectories Enrique Monte Moreno 1,* ID , Alberto García Rigo 2,3 ID , Manuel Hernández-Pajares 2,3 ID and Heng Yang 1 ID 1 Department of Signal Theory and Communications, TALP research center, Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain 2 UPC-IonSAT, Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain 3 IEEC-CTE-CRAE, Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +34-934016435 Academic Editor: name Version June 8, 2018 submitted to Remote Sens. 1 Abstract: In this paper, we present a method for forecasting the ionospheric Total Electron Content 2 (TEC) distribution from the International GNSS Service’s Global Ionospheric Maps. The forecasting 3 system gives an estimation of the value of the TEC distribution based on linear combination of 4 previous TEC maps (i.e. a set of 2D arrays indexed by time), and the computation of a tangent 5 subspace in a manifold associated to each map. The use of the tangent space to each map is justified 6 because it allows to model the possible distortions from one observation to the next as a trajectory on 7 the tangent manifold of the map. The coefficients of the linear combination of the last observations 8 along with the tangent space are estimated at each time stamp in order to minimize the mean square 9 forecasting error with a regularization term. The the estimation is made at each time stamp to adapt 10 the forecast to short-term variations in solar activity.. 11 Keywords: Total Electron Content; Ionosphere; Forecasting; Tangent Distance; GNSS 12 1.