Predicting Flares and Solar Energetic Particle Events: The FORSPEF Tool

A novel integrated prediction system for solar flares (SFs) and solar energetic particle (SEP) events is presented here. The tool called forecasting solar particle events and flares (FORSPEF) provides forecasts of solar eruptive events, such as SFs with a projection to occurrence and velocity of coronal mass ejections (CMEs), and the likelihood of occurrence of an SEP event. In addition, the tool provides nowcasting of SEP events based on actual SF and CME near real-time data, as well as the SEP characteristics ( e.g. peak flux, fluence, rise time, and duration) per parent solar event. The prediction of SFs relies on the effective connected magnetic field strength ( B eff ) metric, which is based on an assessment of potentially flaring active-region (AR) magnetic configurations, and it uses a sophisticated statistical analysis of a large number of AR magnetograms. For the prediction of SEP events, new statistical methods have been developed for the likelihood of the SEP occurrence and the expected SEP characteristics. The prediction window in the forecasting scheme is 24 hours with a refresh rate of 3 hours, while the respective prediction time for the nowcasting scheme depends on the availability of the near real-time data and ranges between 15 – 20 minutes for solar flares and 6 hours for CMEs. We present the modules of the FORSPEF system, their interconnection, and the operational setup. Finally, we demonstrate the validation of the modules of the FORSPEF tool using categorical scores constructed on archived data, and we also discuss independent case studies.