No Arabic abstract
Solar Energetic Particle events (SEPs) are among the most dangerous transient phenomena of solar activity. As hazardous radiation, SEPs may affect the health of astronauts in outer space and adversely impact current and future space exploration. In this paper, we consider the problem of daily prediction of Solar Proton Events (SPEs) based on the characteristics of the magnetic fields in solar Active Regions (ARs), preceding soft X-ray and proton fluxes, and statistics of solar radio bursts. The machine learning (ML) algorithm uses an artificial neural network of custom architecture designed for whole-Sun input. The predictions of the ML model are compared with the SWPC NOAA operational forecasts of SPEs. Our preliminary results indicate that 1) for the AR-based predictions, it is necessary to take into account ARs at the western limb and on the far side of the Sun; 2) characteristics of the preceding proton flux represent the most valuable input for prediction; 3) daily median characteristics of ARs and the counts of type II, III, and IV radio bursts may be excluded from the forecast without performance loss; and 4) ML-based forecasts outperform SWPC NOAA forecasts in situations in which missing SPE events is very undesirable. The introduced approach indicates the possibility of developing robust all-clear SPE forecasts by employing machine learning methods.
We developed a flare prediction model using machine learning, which is optimized to predict the maximum class of flares occurring in the following 24 h. Machine learning is used to devise algorithms that can learn from and make decisions on a huge amount of data. We used solar observation data during the period 2010-2015, such as vector magnetogram, ultraviolet (UV) emission, and soft X-ray emission taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite. We detected active regions from the full-disk magnetogram, from which 60 features were extracted with their time differentials, including magnetic neutral lines, the current helicity, the UV brightening, and the flare history. After standardizing the feature database, we fully shuffled and randomly separated it into two for training and testing. To investigate which algorithm is best for flare prediction, we compared three machine learning algorithms: the support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), and extremely randomized trees (ERT). The prediction score, the true skill statistic (TSS), was higher than 0.9 with a fully shuffled dataset, which is higher than that for human forecasts. It was found that k-NN has the highest performance among the three algorithms. The ranking of the feature importance showed that the previous flare activity is most effective, followed by the length of magnetic neutral lines, the unsigned magnetic flux, the area of UV brightening, and the time differentials of features over 24 h, all of which are strongly correlated with the flux emergence dynamics in an active region.
The magnetic field plays an essential role in the initiation and evolution of different solar phenomena in the corona. The structure and evolution of the 3D coronal magnetic field are still not very well known. A way to get the 3D structure of the coronal magnetic field is by performing magnetic field extrapolations from the photosphere to the corona. In previous work, it was shown that by prescribing the 3D reconstructed loops geometry, the magnetic field extrapolation finds a solution with a better agreement between the modeled field and the reconstructed loops. Also, it improves the quality of the field extrapolation. Stereoscopy represents the classical method for performing 3D coronal loop reconstruction. It uses at least two view directions. When only one vantage point of the coronal loops is available, other 3D reconstruction methods must be applied. Within this work, we present a method for the 3D loop reconstruction based on machine learning. Our purpose for developing this method is to use as many observed coronal loops in space and time for the modeling of the coronal magnetic field. Our results show that we can build machine learning models that can retrieve 3D loops based only on their projection information. In the end, the neural network model will be able to use only 2D information of the coronal loops, identified, traced and extracted from the EUV images, for the calculation of their 3D geometry.
Solar flares produce radiation which can have an almost immediate effect on the near-Earth environment, making it crucial to forecast flares in order to mitigate their negative effects. The number of published approaches to flare forecasting using photospheric magnetic field observations has proliferated, with varying claims about how well each works. Because of the different analysis techniques and data sets used, it is essentially impossible to compare the results from the literature. This problem is exacerbated by the low event rates of large solar flares. The challenges of forecasting rare events have long been recognized in the meteorology community, but have yet to be fully acknowledged by the space weather community. During the interagency workshop on all clear forecasts held in Boulder, CO in 2009, the performance of a number of existing algorithms was compared on common data sets, specifically line-of-sight magnetic field and continuum intensity images from MDI, with consistent definitions of what constitutes an event. We demonstrate the importance of making such systematic comparisons, and of using standard verification statistics to determine what constitutes a good prediction scheme. When a comparison was made in this fashion, no one method clearly outperformed all others, which may in part be due to the strong correlations among the parameters used by different methods to characterize an active region. For M-class flares and above, the set of methods tends towards a weakly positive skill score (as measured with several distinct metrics), with no participating method proving substantially better than climatological forecasts.
In order to discuss the potential impact of solar superflares on space weather, we investigated statistical relations among energetic proton peak flux with energy higher than $ 10 rm MeV$ ($F_p$), CME speed near the Sun ($V_{CME}$) obtained by {it SOHO}/LASCO coronagraph and flare soft X-ray peak flux in 1-8AA band ($F_{SXR}$) during 110 major solar proton events (SPEs) recorded from 1996 to 2014. The linear regression fit results in the scaling relations $V_{CME} propto F_{SXR}^alpha$, $F_ppropto F_{SXR}^beta$ and $F_ppropto V_{CME}^gamma$ with $alpha = 0.30pm 0.04$, $beta = 1.19 pm 0.08$ and $gamma = 4.35 pm 0.50$, respectively. On the basis of simple physical assumptions, on the other hand, we derive scaling relations expressing CME mass ($M_{CME}$), CME speed and energetic proton flux in terms of total flare energy ($E_{flare}$) as, $M_{CME}propto E_{flare}^{2/3}$, $V_{CME}propto E_{flare}^{1/6}$ and $F_{p}propto E_{flare}^{5/6}propto V_{CME}^5$, respectively. We then combine the derived scaling relations with observation, and estimated the upper limit of $V_{CME}$ and $F_p$ to be associated with possible solar superflares.
We introduce a hybrid approach to solar flare prediction, whereby a supervised regularization method is used to realize feature importance and an unsupervised clustering method is used to realize the binary flare/no-flare decision. The approach is validated against NOAA SWPC data.