Flare forecasting at the Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre

Sophie A. Murray, Suzy Bingham, Michael Sharpe, David R. Jackson
(Submitted on 20 Mar 2017)

The Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre produces 24/7/365 space weather guidance, alerts, and forecasts to a wide range of government and commercial end users across the United Kingdom. Solar flare forecasts are one of its products, which are issued multiple times a day in two forms; forecasts for each active region on the solar disk over the next 24 hours, and full-disk forecasts for the next four days. Here the forecasting process is described in detail, as well as first verification of archived forecasts using methods commonly used in operational weather prediction. Real-time verification available for operational flare forecasting use is also described. The influence of human forecasters is highlighted, with human-edited forecasts outperforming original model results, and forecasting skill decreasing over longer forecast lead times.

Comments:    Accepted for publication in Space Weather. 18 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables
Subjects:    Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR); Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability (physics.data-an); Space Physics (physics.space-ph)
Cite as:    arXiv:1703.06754 [astro-ph.SR] (or arXiv:1703.06754v1 [astro-ph.SR] for this version)
Submission history
From: Sophie A. Murray 
[v1] Mon, 20 Mar 2017 14:09:39 GMT (722kb,D)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06754