The Earth's ionosphere exhibits changes from one day to the next that are currently not well predicted. These changes are important because they affect radio communication, navigation, and even re-entry predictions (e.g., the recent demise of dozens of Starlink satellites), The Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) is a new NASA mission that launched in 2019 to study the sources of this variability, known as space weather. This project will involve using the first ~3 years of data from ICON. The initial goal would be to apply a simple regressor quantify the various influences to space weather (geomagnetic activity, atmospheric winds, chemistry, season, etc.) to learn about the processes that dominate ionospheric variability. Future goals will be determined as the project progresses, but could include more complex machine learning techniques or using other data sets, all with the broad goal to inform physical understanding, and not just predictive power.
