Many studies indicated that ionospheric total electron content (TEC) prediction is vital for terrestrial and space-based radio-communication systems. In previous TEC prediction schemes based on RNN, they learn TEC representations from previous time steps, and each time-step made an equal contribution to a prediction. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose two improvements in our study: (1) To predict TEC with both past and future time-step, Bidirectional Gate Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) was presented to improve the capabilities. (2) To highlight critical time-step information, attention mechanism was used to provide weights to each time-step. The proposed attentional BiGRU TEC predicting method was evaluated on the publicly available data set from the Centre for Orbit Determination in Europe. We chose three geographical locations in low latitude, middle latitude, and high latitude to verify the performance of our proposed model. Comparative experiments were conducted using Deep Neural Network (DNN), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Term memory (BiLSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). Experimental results show that the proposed Attentional BiGRU model is superior to the other models in the selected nine regions. In addition, the paper discussed the effects of latitudes and solar activities on the performance of Attentional BiGRU model. Experimental results show that the higher the latitude, the higher the prediction accuracy of our proposed model. Experimental results also show that in the middle latitude, the prediction accuracy of the model is less affected by solar activity, and in other areas, the model is greatly affected by solar activity.

The prediction of the total electron content (TEC) in the ionosphere is of great significance for satellite communication, navigation and positioning. This paper presents a multiple-attention mechanism-based LSTM (multiple-attention Long Short-Term Memory, MA-LSTM) TEC prediction model. The main achievements of this paper are as follows: (1) adding an L1 constraint to the LSTM-based TEC prediction model—an L1 constraint prevents excessive attention to the input sequence during modelling and prevents overfitting; (2) adding multiple-attention mechanism modules to the TEC prediction model. By adding three parallel attention modules, respectively, we calculated the attention value of the output vector from the LSTM layer, and calculated its attention distribution through the softmax function. Then, the vector output by each LSTM layer was weighted and summed with the corresponding attention distribution so as to highlight and focus on important features. To verify our model’s performance, eight regions located in China were selected in the European Orbit Determination Center (CODE) TEC grid dataset. In these selected areas, comparative experiments were carried out with LSTM, GRU and Att-BiGRU. The results show that our proposed MA-LSTM model is obviously superior to the comparison models. This paper also discusses the prediction effect of the model in different months. The results show that the prediction effect of the model is best in July, August and September, with the R-square reaching above 0.99. In March, April and May, the R-square is slightly low, but even at the worst time, the fitting degree between the predicted value and the real value still reaches 0.965. We also discussed the influence of a magnetic quiet period and a magnetic storm period on the prediction performance. The results show that in the magnetic quiet period, our model fit very well. In the magnetic storm period, the R-square is lower than that of the magnetic quiet period, but it can also reach 0.989. The research in this paper provides a reliable method for the short-term prediction of ionospheric TEC.