Revolutionizing the Detection of Lightning-Generated Whistlers: A Rapid Recognition Model with Parallel Bidirectional SRU Network

Lightning-generated whistlers (LW) play a crucial role in understanding magnetosphere–ionosphere coupling mechanisms and, perhaps, identifying precursor signals of natural disasters, such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Traditional frequency–time image recognition techniques require approximately 40 years to analyze seven years of observational data from the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES), which fails to meet the requirements for practical implementation. To address this issue, a novel and highly efficient model for LW recognition is proposed, integrating speech processing technology with a parallel bidirectional Simple Recurrent Unit (SRU) neural network. The proposed model significantly outperforms traditional methods in computational efficiency, reducing the parameter count by 99% to 0.1 M and enhancing processing speed by 99%, achieving 20 ms per sample. Despite these improvements, the model maintains excellent performance metrics, including 93% precision, 88.7% recall, and 90.7% F1-score, which is a measure of predictive performance. As a result, the model can process seven years of data in just 33 days, marking a 442-fold increase in processing speed compared to conventional approaches.