Events in Physics
Siegfried Gonzi (MET Office): The Met Office’s Operational Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) Prediction System
Abstract: MOSWOC (Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre) started providing CME arrival time forecasts in 2014. CMEs consist of plasma that travel from the Sun to Earth at hundreds of kilometers per seconds. Earth directed CMEs can lead to significant disruptions to electricity power generation, Global Navigation Satellite System positioning and satellite orbit tracking. Typical travel times of CMEs from the Sun to Earth are 2 to 4 days. It is important to model the evolution of the CMEs as soon as they have been observed in coronagraph images. There are many processes involved before a forecast can be issued. Each of these processes generates its own problems due to lack of the perfect observations and models. MOSWOC’s Sun to Earth model is initialized by boundary conditions which are imperfect and the CME parameters that go into the model have to be derived, from a CME Analysis Tool (CAT), by human forecasters. Given all these uncertainties one single model forecast is hardly a good representation of the true state, and a space weather forecaster would never trust it. I describe in this talk our CME ensemble prediction system which is used to deal with the uncertainties in the data and models that otherwise would lead to inadequate forecasts. But even with an ensemble prediction system the CME arrival time error can exceed +-24 hours. I will also discuss our future plans for improving the CME forecasting system at the Met Office.