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Understanding Problem Forecasts of ISEST Campaign Flare-CME Events

  • Earth-affecting Solar Transients
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Abstract

The goal of the International Study of Earth-affecting Solar Transients (ISEST) project as part of the Variability of the Sun and Its Terrestrial Impact (VarSITI) program is to understand the origin, evolution, and propagation of solar transients through the space between the Sun and Earth, and to improve our prediction capability for space weather. A goal of ISEST Working Group 4 (Campaign Events) is to study a set of well-observed Sun-to-Earth events to develop an understanding of why some events are successfully forecast (textbook cases), whereas others become problem or failed forecasts. In this article we study six cases during the rise of Solar Cycle 24 that highlight forecasting problems. Likely source coronal mass ejections (CMEs) were identified in all six cases, but the related solar surface activity ranged from uncertain or weak to X-class flares. The geoeffects ranged from none to severe as in the two Sun–Earth events in 2015 that caused severe storms. These events were chosen to illustrate some key problems in understanding the chain from cause to geoeffect.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the ISEST project, one of the four projects of the VarSITI program. VarSITI is sponsored and supported by SCOSTEP for the period a five-year period, 2014 – 2018. VarSITI is led by N. Gopalswamy, the President of SCOSTEP. We thank Jie Zhang for his leadership of ISEST and for organizing the ISEST workshops. We thank Jie Zhang and Phillip Hess for developing and hosting the ISEST event catalogs, data, and other information, which Working Group 4 has used extensively (see: http://solar.gmu.edu/heliophysics/index.php/Main_Page ). We are grateful to these WG 4 members who contributed to the data analysis and results of the events that are presented here: Nat Gopalswamy, Phillip Hess, Emilia Kilpua, Bernie Jackson, Ying Liu, Noe Lugaz, Katsuhide Marubashi, Christian Möstl, Ian Richardson, Brigitte Schmieder, Kazuo Shiokawa, Manuela Temmer, Angelos Vourlidas, Yuming Wang, C-C Wu, and Jie Zhang. The SOHO/LASCO CME catalog is generated and maintained at the CDAW Data Center by NASA and The Catholic University of America in cooperation with the Naval Research Laboratory. SOHO is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISR, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Ave., Chestnut Hill, MA, 02659, USA

    David Webb

  2. Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory, 3251 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, CA, 94304, USA

    Nariaki Nitta

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Correspondence to David Webb.

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Earth-affecting Solar Transients

Guest Editors: Jie Zhang, Xochitl Blanco-Cano, Nariaki Nitta, and Nandita Srivastava

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Webb, D., Nitta, N. Understanding Problem Forecasts of ISEST Campaign Flare-CME Events. Sol Phys 292, 142 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-017-1166-4

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