Predicting the Sun: Black Swans or Dragon Kings?
Abstract
Our goal of predicting the Sun spans timescales from seconds to centuries and phenomena from flares to convective flows. We are faced with questions of what extremes to expect when predicting each phenomenon. Some extremes are obvious: What is the brightest flare, largest active region or fastest coronal mass ejection we can expect? Others are less so: What is the largest magnetic field strength? Or how often should we expect a Grand Minimum, an era of low to absent solar activity, and what happens to the irradiance of the Sun during that era? Most phenomena have a robust set of observations covering a wide range of possibilities that allows statistical methods to be used. Every so often, an exceptional event is seen, such as the X45 flare of November 2002 or the geomagnetic storm following the Carrington Event in September 1859, that sits outside of those statistics. Longer term examples include predicting sunspot cycles of unusually large or small amplitude. I will describe Black Swans and Dragon Kings and how they can be used to understand the predictions of extreme events in solar physics.
- Publication:
-
2018 Triennial Earth-Sun Summit (TESS)
- Pub Date:
- May 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018tess.conf22405P