A document by Harriet Turner. Click on the document to view its contents.

The ambient solar wind plays a significant role in propagating interplanetary coronal mass ejections and is an important driver of space weather geomagnetic storms. A computationally efficient and widely used method to predict the ambient solar wind radial velocity near Earth involves coupling three models: Potential Field Source Surface, Wang-Sheeley-Arge (WSA), and Heliospheric Upwind eXtrapolation. However, the model chain has eleven uncertain parameters that are mainly non-physical due to empirical relations and simplified physics assumptions. We, therefore, propose a comprehensive uncertainty quantification (UQ) framework that is able to successfully quantify and reduce parametric uncertainties in the model chain. The UQ framework utilizes variance-based global sensitivity analysis followed by Bayesian inference via Markov chain Monte Carlo to learn the posterior densities of the most influential parameters. The sensitivity analysis results indicate that the five most influential parameters are all WSA parameters. Additionally, we show that the posterior densities of such influential parameters vary greatly from one Carrington rotation to the next. The influential parameters are trying to overcompensate for the missing physics in the model chain, highlighting the need to enhance the robustness of the model chain to the choice of WSA parameters. The ensemble predictions generated from the learned posterior densities significantly reduce the uncertainty in solar wind velocity predictions near Earth.

Accurate space weather forecasting requires advanced knowledge of the solar wind conditions in near-Earth space. Data assimilation (DA) combines model output and observations to find an optimum estimation of reality and has led to large advances in terrestrial weather forecasting. It is now being applied to space weather forecasting. Here, we use solar wind DA with in-situ observations to reconstruct solar wind speed in the ecliptic plane between 30 solar radii and Earth’s orbital radius. This is used to provide solar wind speed hindcasts. Here, we assimilate observations from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and the near-Earth dataset, OMNI. Analysis of two periods of time, one in solar minimum and one in solar maximum, reveals that assimilating observations from multiple spacecraft provides a more accurate forecast than using any one spacecraft individually. The age of the observations also has a significant impact on forecast error, whereby the mean absolute error (MAE) sharply increases by up to 23% when the forecast lead time first exceeds the corotation time associated with the longitudinal separation between the observing spacecraft and the forecast location. It was also found that removing coronal mass ejections from the DA input and verification time series reduces the forecast MAE by up to 10% as it removes false streams from the forecast time series. This work highlights the importance of an L5 space weather monitoring mission for near-Earth solar wind forecasting and suggests that an additional mission to L4 would further improve future solar wind DA forecasting capabilities.

The magnetosphere, ionosphere and thermosphere (MIT) act as a coherently integrated system (geospace), driven in part by solar influences and characterized by variability and complexity. Among the most important and yet uncertain aspects of the geospace system is energy and momentum coupling between regions, which is, in part, accomplished by the transfer of charged particles from the magnetosphere to the ionosphere in a process known as particle precipitation, and in the opposite direction by ion outflow. Both processes are inherently multiscale and manifest the variabilities and complexities of the geospace system. Despite the importance of the transfer of particles, existing models are increasingly ill-equipped to provide the specification necessary for the growing demand for geospace now- and forecasts. Due to recent trends in the availability of data, we now face an exciting opportunity to progress particle transfer in geospace through the intersection of traditional approaches and state-of-the-art data-driven sciences. We reveal novel particle transfer models utilizing machine learning (ML), present results from the models, and provide an evaluation of their capabilities including comparisons with observations and the current ’state-of-the-art’ models (e.g., OVATION Prime for particle precipitation and the Gamera-Ionosphere Polar Wind Model for ion outflow). We detail the data wrangling required to utilize the available geospace observations to make progress on the long-standing challenge of particle transfer and place specific emphasis on the discovery possible when ML models are appropriate and robustly interrogated in the context of physical understanding. Our presentation helps illustrate the trends in the application of data science in space science.

It has long been recognized that the energy source for major solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) is the solar magnetic field within active regions. Specifically, it is believed to be the release of the free magnetic energy (energy above the potential field state) stored in the field prior to eruption. For estimates of the free energy to provide a prognostic for future eruptions, we must know how much energy an active region can store – Is there a bound to this energy? The Aly-Sturrock theorem shows that the energy of a fully force-free field cannot exceed the energy of the so-called open field. If the theorem holds, this places an upper limit on the amount of free energy that can be stored. In recent simulations, we have found that the energy of a closely related field, the partially open field (POF), can place a useful bound on the energy of an eruption from real active regions, a much tighter constraint than the energy of the fully open field. A database of flare ribbons (Kazachenko et al., ApJ 845, 2017) offers us an opportunity to test this idea observationally. A flare ribbon mask is defined as the area swept out by the ribbons during the flare. It can serve as a proxy for the region of the field that opened during the eruption. In this preliminary study, we use the ribbon masks to define the POF for several large events originating in solar cycle 24 active regions, and compute the energy of the POF. We compare these energies with the X-ray fluxes and CME energies for these events. Work supported by NSF, NASA, and AFOSR.

Geometric modelling of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) is a widely used tool for assessing their kinematic evolution. Furthermore, techniques based on geometric modelling, such as ELEvoHI, are being developed into forecast tools for space weather prediction. These models assume that solar wind structure does not affect the evolution of the CME, which is an unquantified source of uncertainty. We use a large number of Cone CME simulations with the HUXt solar wind model to quantify the scale of uncertainty introduced into geometric modelling and the ELEvoHI CME arrival times by solar wind structure. We produce a database of simulations, representing an average, a fast, and an extreme CME scenario, each independently propagating through 100 different ambient solar wind environments. Synthetic heliospheric imager observations of these simulations are then used with a range of geometric models to estimate the CME kinematics. The errors of geometric modelling depend on the location of the observer, but do not seem to depend on the CME scenario. In general, geometric models are biased towards predicting CME apex distances that are larger than the true value. For these CME scenarios, geometric modelling errors are minimised for an observer in the L5 region. Furthermore, geometric modelling errors increase with the level of solar wind structure in the path of the CME. The ELEvoHI arrival time errors are minimised for an observer in the L5 region, with mean absolute arrival time errors of 8.2±1.2h, 8.3±1.0h, and 5.8±0.9h for the average, fast, and extreme CME scenarios

Accurate predictions of the properties of interplanetary coronal mass ejection (ICME)-driven disturbances are a key objective for space weather forecasts. The ICME’s time of arrival (ToA) at Earth is an important parameter and one that is amenable to a variety of modeling approaches. Previous studies suggest that the best models can predict the arrival time to within an absolute error of 10-15 hours. Here, we investigate the main sources of error in predicting a CME’s ToA at Earth. These can be broken into two main categories: (1) the initial properties of the ejecta, including its speed, mass, and direction of propagation; and (2) the properties of the ambient solar wind into which it propagates. To estimate the relative contribution to ToA errors, we construct a set of numerical experiments of cone-model CMEs, where we vary the initial speed, mass, and direction at the inner radial boundary. Additionally, we build an ensemble of 12 ambient solar wind solutions using realizations from the ADAPT model. We find that each component in the chain contributes between ±2.5 and ±7 hours of uncertainty to the estimate of the CME’s ToA. Importantly, different realizations of the synoptic produce the largest errors. This suggests that estimates of ToA will continue to be plagued with intrinsic errors of ±10 hours until tighter constraints can be found for these boundary conditions. Our results suggest that there are clear benefits to focused investigations aimed at reducing the uncertainties in CME speed, mass, direction, and input boundary magnetic fields.