A Volterra Adaptive Filtering Method for Polar Motion Prediction Based on Chaotic Time Series

In consideration of the complex time-varying characteristics of polar motion (PM), this paper takes PM as chaotic time series. A Volterra adaptive filter is employed for predicting PM based on the state space reconstruction of delay-coordinate embedding of dynamic system. This method first uses the Least Squares (LS) technology to estimate the harmonic models for the linear trend, Annual and Chandler Wobbles (AW and CW) in PM. The selected LS deterministic models are subsequently used to extrapolate the linear trend, AW, and CW, and obtain the LS residues (the difference between the LS model and PM data themselves). Secondly, the phase space and largest Lyapunov exponent of the LS residues are reconstructed, and calculated by means of the C-C and small data-set algorithm, respectively. Further, a Volterra adaptive filter is designed for generating the extrapolations of the LS residues. The extrapolated LS residues are then added to the LS deterministic models in order to obtain the predicted PM values. The EOP C04 time series released by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) are selected as data base to generate the PM predictions up to 60 days in the future. The results of the predictions are analyzed and compared with those obtained by the Earth Orientation Parameters Prediction Comparison Campaign (EOP PCC) and IERS Bulletin A. The results show that the accuracy of the predictions up to 30 days is comparable with that by the most accurate prediction techniques participating in the EOP PCC for PM, but worse than that by those most accurate techniques beyond 30 days in the future. The results also illustrate that the short-term predictions are better than those published by the IERS Bulletin A. However, the errors of the predictions rapidly increase with the prediction days. It is therefore concluded that the proposed method is a potential technology for short-term PM prediction.