Autoregressive forecast of monthly total ozone concentration: A neurocomputing approach

The present study endeavors to generate autoregressive neural network (AR-NN) models to forecast the monthly total ozone concentration over Kolkata (22°34′, 88°22′), India. The issues associated with the applicability of neural network to geophysical processes are discussed. The autocorrelation structure of the monthly total ozone time series is investigated, and stationarity of the time series is established through the periodogram. From various autoregressive moving average (ARMA) and autoregressive models fit to the time series, the autoregressive model of order 10 is identified as the best. Subsequently, 10 autoregressive neural network (AR-NN) models are generated; the 10th order autoregressive neural network model with extensive input variable selection performs the best among all the competitive models in forecasting the monthly total ozone concentration over the study zone.