The Next Level in Automated Solar Flare Forecasting: the EU FLARECAST Project
Abstract
We attempt an informative description of the Flare Likelihood And Region Eruption Forecasting (FLARECAST) project, European Commission's first large-scale investment to explore the limits of reliability and accuracy achieved for the forecasting of major solar flares. We outline the consortium, top-level objectives and first results of the project, highlighting the diversity and fusion of expertise needed to deliver what was promised. The project's final product, featuring an openly accessible, fully modular and free to download flare forecasting facility will be delivered in early 2018. The project's three objectives, namely, science, research-to-operations and dissemination / communication, are also discussed: in terms of science, we encapsulate our close-to-final assessment on how close (or far) are we from a practically exploitable solar flare forecasting. In terms of R2O, we briefly describe the architecture of the FLARECAST infrastructure that includes rigorous validation for each forecasting step. From the three different communication levers of the project we finally focus on lessons learned from the two-way interaction with the community of stakeholders and governmental organizations. The FLARECAST project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 640216.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFMSA21C..07G
- Keywords:
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- 7924 Forecasting;
- SPACE WEATHER;
- 7934 Impacts on technological systems;
- SPACE WEATHER;
- 7959 Models;
- SPACE WEATHER;
- 7974 Solar effects;
- SPACE WEATHER