Abstract
The vast majority of solar cycle predictions focus on predicting the
11-year sunspot cycle, while space weather and geomagnetic activity
predictions are largely made for short time scales, from hours up to a
month. Here, we aim to predict geomagnetic activity in the solar cycle
time scale. We use a 180-year composite of the geomagnetic aa index
and fit each aa cycle between two successive sunspot minima with a
parameterized asymmetric Gaussian curve. We show that the model
reasonably describes the cyclic behavior of aa using only two free
parameters. We present how these parameters can be forecasted using past
aa values and a recently developed sunspot prediction model.
Employing these estimated parameter values, we hindcast each past aa
cycle from Solar Cycle 10 onwards and make a prediction for Solar Cycle
25, also estimating the uncertainties using a leave-one-out
cross-validation methodology. Each cycle prediction is made at the time
of minimum aa starting the respective cycle. For Solar Cycle 25, our
prediction gives the aa index maximum of 21 +-
3 nT (at the original aa
index level) early in the cycle in July 2022, suggesting that Solar
Cycle 25, similarly to Solar Cycles 11 and 13, will not have a strong,
long-lasting peak of geomagnetic activity in the late declining phase.