SM015-09
Evaluating Model Advancements for Predicting CME Arrival Time - CCMC/NOAA SWPC Partnership Final Report
Wednesday, 9 December 2020: 06:12
Virtual
M. Leila Mays1, Eric T Adamson2, Victor J Pizzo3, Peter J MacNeice4, Dusan Odstrcil5, Douglas Alan Biesecker6, Andrew Marble7, Carl J Henney8, Charles Nickolos Arge1, Shaela I Jones1, Samantha Wallace9, Aleksandre Taktakishvili10, Chiu Wiegand1, Jan Merka11 and Maria M Kuznetsova12, (1)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (2)Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Boulder, CO, United States, (3)NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, Boulder, CO, United States, (4)NASA Goddard SFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (5)George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, United States, (6)Space Weather Prediction Center, Boulder, CO, United States, (7)National Solar Observatory, Tucson, AZ, United States, (8)Air Force Research Laboratory Kirtland AFB, Kirtland AFB, NM, United States, (9)NASA GSFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (10)Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, United States, (11)University of Maryland Baltimore County, Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute, Baltimore, MD, United States, (12)NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States
Abstract:
In 2017 NOAA SWPC and CCMC started a new project under an annex to a memorandum of understanding between NASA and NOAA. The purpose of this project was to assess improvements in CME arrival time forecasts at Earth using the Air Force Data Assimilative Photospheric Flux Transport (ADAPT) model driven by data from the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) ground observatories. These outputs are then fed into the coupled Wang-Sheeley-Arge (WSA) - ENLIL model and compared to an operational version of WSA-ENLIL (without ADAPT). The project was performed in close collaboration with the model developers. SWPC selected a set of 38 historical events over the period of five years from 2012-2014 (33 events) and 2017-2019 (5 events). The overall three-year project consisted of multiple simulation validation studies for the entire event set (1292 simulations): (a) benchmark single map (operational version prior to May 2019) (b) time-dependent sequence of GONG maps driving WSA-ENLIL with 4 different model settings (c) single test simulation of a time-dependent sequence of GONG maps driving ADAPT-WSA-ENLIL (d) single GONG map driving ADAPT-WSA-ENLIL (e) time-dependent sequence of GONG maps driving ADAPT-WSA-ENLIL.
We report that for all 38 events, within each model version/settings combination, the CME arrival time error decreased by 0.2 to 0.9 hours when using a sequence of time-dependent zero-point corrected magnetograms compared to using single magnetogram input. Overall, for all events, when using the older uncorrected magnetograms, the CME arrival time error increased for all new model versions/settings combinations compared to the benchmark. Notably for the 5 events in the period 2017-2019 when more reliable zero-point corrected magnetograms were available, the ADAPT-WSA-ENLIL (median arrival realization) CME arrival time error decreased by 3.1±4.0 hours for single map driven ADAPT compared to the single map driven benchmark, by 4.4±7.2 hours for time-dependent ADAPT compared to the time-dependent driven benchmark, and by 5.8+8.6-7.6 hours for time-dependent ADAPT compared to the single map driven benchmark.
