Evaluating Auroral Forecasts Against Satellite Observations

Abstract:

Enhanced auroral activity at Earth can cause disruption to long-range radio communications and ground induced currents making forecasting the location of the auroral oval and probability of the aurora occurring of interest to many sectors such as aviation, energy and defence.

The OVATION-Prime 2013 (OP-2013, Newell et al., 2014) auroral precipitation model is currently in operation at the UK Met Office with one version delivering a 30-minute forecast of the probability of observing the aurora. By applying terrestrial weather forecast verification techniques, we evaluate the performance of this operational implementation of OP-2013 against auroral emission boundaries determined from global far-ultraviolet (FUV) observations captured by the IMAGE satellite between 2000-2002.

Our analysis shows that, within the Met Office implementation of the model, OP-2013 performs well at predicting the location of the auroral oval under nominal space weather conditions but the forecast probabilities of aurora occurring tend to be lower than the observed occurrence of the aurora.
The results of this study may assist space weather forecasters at the Met Office with interpreting the output of the auroral forecast model in daily operations and potentially increase the reliability of the forecast.