Shreshth A. Malik, James Walsh, Giacomo Acciarini et al.
Accurate estimation of thermospheric density is critical for precise modeling of satellite drag forces in low Earth orbit (LEO). Improving this estimation is crucial to tasks such as state estimation, collision avoidance, and re-entry calculations. The largest source of uncertainty in determining thermospheric density is modeling the effects of space weather driven by solar and geomagnetic activity. Current operational models rely on ground-based proxy indices which imperfectly correlate with the complexity of solar outputs and geomagnetic responses. In this work, we directly incorporate NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) extreme ultraviolet (EUV) spectral images into a neural thermospheric density model to determine whether the predictive performance of the model is increased by using space-based EUV imagery data instead of, or in addition to, the ground-based proxy indices. We demonstrate that EUV imagery can enable predictions with much higher temporal resolution and replace ground-based proxies while significantly increasing performance relative to current operational models. Our method paves the way for assimilating EUV image data into operational thermospheric density forecasting models for use in LEO satellite navigation processes.
Chance Haycock, Edward Thorpe-Woods, James Walsh et al.
One of the Greater London Authority's (GLA) response to the COVID-19 pandemic brings together multiple large-scale and heterogeneous datasets capturing mobility, transportation and traffic activity over the city of London to better understand 'busyness' and enable targeted interventions and effective policy-making. As part of Project Odysseus we describe an early-warning system and introduce an expectation-based scan statistic for networks to help the GLA and Transport for London, understand the extent to which populations are following government COVID-19 guidelines. We explicitly treat the case of geographically fixed time-series data located on a (road) network and primarily focus on monitoring the dynamics across large regions of the capital. Additionally, we also focus on the detection and reporting of significant spatio-temporal regions. Our approach is extending the Network Based Scan Statistic (NBSS) by making it expectation-based (EBP) and by using stochastic processes for time-series forecasting, which enables us to quantify metric uncertainty in both the EBP and NBSS frameworks. We introduce a variant of the metric used in the EBP model which focuses on identifying space-time regions in which activity is quieter than expected.