S3: Solar eruptions (seconds to tens of minutes)

Moderator:

Larisza Krista (University of Colorado, USA), larisza.krista@colorado.edu

Co-Moderator:

Jordan Guerra (Villanova University, USA), jordan.guerra@noaa.gov

Impact:

Driver of space environment variability in heliosphere, geospace and other planets

Introduction:

Adverse space weather is known to result from solar flares, coronal mass ejections (CMEs), and associated solar energetic particle events (SEPs).

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With solar eruptions potentially disrupting global navigation systems and radio communications, damaging power grids and spacecraft instrumentation, and causing increased radiation dosages to astronauts, forecasts of these type of events have become important for a variety of end users worldwide. Solar flare forecasts are the most established in operations, although the current state of the art is a human-in-the-loop, with prediction algorithm outputs barely outperforming climatology. SEP forecasts are often based on the flare forecast and so also suffer from inaccuracies, generally starting from a measure the complexity of highly turbulent magnetic fields of active regions (ARs; consisting of groups of sunspots) on the solar surface. There is considerable work to be done to improve the accuracy of these forecasts, and operational centers do not yet even provide probabilistic forecasts of CMEs, with only their arrival at Earth and other points in the solar system predicted once they have been observed.

Objectives:

Improve predictions of solar eruptions (flares, SEPs, and CMEs) with better

cadence,
latency,
magnitude estimates.

Challenges:

Reliable measurements of ARs (and filaments in the case of CMEs) on the solar surface and in the solar atmosphere are needed as a starting point to most forecasts. This will prove challenging for CME forecasts considering there are no direct measurements of the 3D structure of these regions, only magnetic field extrapolation models from the surface, which inherently contain significant inaccuracies. Improved latency will be challenging for forecasts in rapidly evolving ARs, although observations from missions such as the Lagrange at L5 will aid these efforts.

Action topics:

For list of action topics please click "Read more":

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Understanding processes responsible for the occurrence of impulsive events.
Understanding and classification of pre-eruption configurations.
Understanding the connection between CMEs, other eruptive phenomena, and their solar sources.
Modeling of CME initiation.
Understanding and modeling of seed populations for injection into the energetic particle acceleration process.
Forecasting of impulsive events (Flares, CME, SEPs)
Definition of benchmarks, performance metrics, and uncertainty assessment for impulsive event forecasts.
Automatization and improving of operational forecasts.
Generating inputs to our Living Global Space weather roadmap.

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