Automatic Identification of Magnetospheric Regions using Supervised Machine Learning Models

Abstract

We present an automated approach for identifying magnetospheric regions using supervised machine learning techniques applied to Magnetospheric MultiScale mission data. Our method utilizes ion energy spectra, total magnetic field, total ion temperature, ion velocity component, ion density and spacecraft position data to classify five distinct plasma environments: solar wind, magnetosheath, inner magnetosphere, plasma sheet, and lobe regions. The approach combines a convolutional neural network (CNN) for analyzing ion energy spectrogram data with a Random Forest classifier for scalar plasma parameters. The CNN method employs 2D convolution to identify spatial and temporal patterns in the ion energy spectrogram treated as image-like data, while the Random Forest model processes averaged magnetic field, temperature, velocity, density and position parameters. Our hybrid model achieves 99% accuracy on test dataset with an F1 score of 0.99, providing reliable automated region identification at 3-minute temporal resolution. This lightweight approach requires minimal manual data labeling and can be readily applied to other magnetospheric missions with similar data products.