Geomagnetically Induced Currents and Space Weather Prediction in Austria

Unusually high transformer sound levels triggered the GIC research in Austria. The measurements revealed DC currents highly correlated with geomagnetic field variations. There are currently 9 self-developed measurement monitoring transformer neutral point currents in the Austrian transmission grid. The developed GIC-grid-simulation tool calculates the currents in the power grid from the measured magnetic field data. The calculation is based on an earth subsurface conductivity model combined with a model of the electrical transmission grid. The comparison between continuous measurements and calculations results in constantly improved calculation methods. We wish to provide forecasts of future GICs using the incoming solar wind measured at the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 1 (L1) as a basis. We aim to predict the two horizontal geoelectric field components, Ex and Ey, with the ground truth being the geoelectric field modelled from geomagnetic variations. The forecasting is carried out using a recurrent neural network (LSTM), which takes solar wind speed, density and magnetic field, as well as recent geomagnetic variations, as input and then outputs the maximum expected geoelectric field in the next 30-40 minutes, assumed to be homogenous across Austria. The fit of simulation to measurement will be shown with recent solar events of 2021.