Ionospheric short-term forecasting is very important to radio communication, navigation and radar systems. In this paper, in order to improve the regional prediction accuracy of ionosphere, a model of regional prediction of the ionospheric F2 layer critical frequency in China area 1 hour in advance is set up based on the support vector machine (Support Vector Machine, referred to as SVM for short) method. In this model, the influence of solar activity, geomagnetic activity, the upper atmosphere, geographical location and other factors on the ionosphere is taken into consideration. Results of this model is compared to Back-Propagation referred to as BP for short the neural network of the same input parameters and the IRI model (International Reference Ionosphere, referred to as IRI for short). The results show that the average relative error of annual prediction of SVM in high solar activity years decreases by 2.5％ and 9.6％, respectively, compared with the neural network and the IRI models and in low solar activity decreases by 1.8％ and 7.5％, respectively. In the low latitude area, the prediction of SVM has more significant advantages over the BP neural network. In the high and low solar activity years it decreases by 3.2％ and 2.7％, respectively. During the storm time SVM also shows a relatively good prediction ability. This proves that the developed model based on SVM in the paper has more advantages over the BP neural network and IRI model.
