Space Weather Forecasts Driven by the ADAPT Model

Abstract:

In this presentation, we highlight recent progress to forecast key space weather parameters with the ADAPT (Air Force Data Assimilative Photospheric flux Transport) model. Driven by a magnetic flux transport model, ADAPT evolves global solar magnetic maps forward 1 to 7 days in the future to provide realistic estimates of the solar near-side field distribution used to forecast the solar wind, F10.7 (i.e., the solar 10.7 cm radio flux), extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and far ultraviolet (FUV) irradiance. Input to the ADAPT model includes solar near-side estimates of the inferred photospheric magnetic field from space-based (i.e., HMI) and ground-based (e.g., GONG & VSM) instruments. We summarize the recent findings that: 1) the sum of the absolute value of strong magnetic fields, associated with sunspots, is shown to correlate well with the observed daily F10.7 variability (Henney et al. 2012); and 2) the sum of the absolute value of weak magnetic fields, associated with plage regions, is shown to correlate well with EUV and FUV irradiance variability (Henney et al. 2015). In addition, recent progress to utilize the ADAPT global maps as input to the Wang-Sheeley-Arge (WSA) coronal and solar wind model is presented. We also discuss the challenges of observing less than half of the solar surface at any given time and the need for future magnetograph instruments near L1 and L5.