Fostering scientific collaboration for improved space weather forecasting

Murray, Sophie

Abstract:

Severe space weather events have the potential to significantly impact a range of vital technologies on Earth and in near-Earth space. Understanding the processes and sources involved in the solar eruptions that cause these events is imperative to provide accurate space weather forecasts. Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and other solar eruptive phenomena can be physically linked by combining data from a multitude of ground-based and space-based instruments as well as models, however this can be challenging for automated operational systems.

The European Union (EU) Framework Package 7 HELCATS project (helcats-fp7.eu) created numerous data products from heliospheric imaging onboard the two NASA/STEREO spacecraft in order to track the evolution of CMEs in the inner heliosphere. Using the project’s main catalogue of nearly 2,000 CME events, an automated algorithm was developed to connect the CMEs observed by STEREO to any corresponding solar flares and active region sources on the solar surface. The resulting catalogue was compared to the extensive active region property database created by the EU Horizon 2020 FLARECAST project (flarecast.eu), which developed a flare forecasting system including state-of-the-art machine learning techniques with near-real-time verification.

The comparison provided insight into the link between CME and flare events, as well as characteristics of eruptive active regions. This collaborative effort provided an excellent opportunity to foster communication between scientific projects which may work in parallel on similar research topics of benefit to space weather forecasting. The results have also provided a solid basis to develop an operational active region warning system, with properties of interest flagged when passing a certain threshold. Close discussions between the different project scientists and with space weather forecasters were crucial to ensure development of a system useful for operations as well as scientific discovery.