Prediction of the Smoothed Monthly Mean Sunspot Area Using Artificial Neural Metwork

Sunspot area is an important feature to measure the solar activities. Prediction of sunspot area can provide useful information for solar activities and space weather studies etc. In this paper, we propose a smoothed monthly mean sunspot area prediction method using artificial neural network. The prediction model is built by training the area data before the eighteenth solar cycle, and then forecast the data after the eighteenth solar week. We also consider the influence of different training step and prediction step respectively. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Finally, we forecast the smoothed monthly mean sunspot area from March 2011 to March 2012.