NOAA SWPC / CCMC Partnership to Validate Heliospheric Models

In 2017 NOAA SWPC and CCMC started a new project under an annex to a memorandum of understanding between NASA and NOAA. The purpose of this project is to assess improvements in CME arrival time forecasts at Earth using the Air Force Data Assimilative Photospheric Flux Transport (ADAPT) model driven by data from the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) ground observatories. These outputs are then fed into the coupled Wang-Sheeley-Arge (WSA) - ENLIL model and then compared to the current operational version of WSA-ENLIL (without ADAPT). The project is performed in close collaboration with model developers.

SWPC has selected a set of 33 historical events over the period of three years from 2012-2014. The overall two-year project consists of multiple simulation validation studies for the entire event set: (a) benchmark (current operational version) (b) time-dependent sequence of GONG maps driving WSA-ENLIL (c) single test simulation of a time-dependent sequence of GONG maps driving ADAPT-WSA-ENLIL (d) single GONG map driving ADAPT-WSA-ENLIL (e) time-dependent sequence of GONG maps driving ADAPT-WSA-ENLIL. After each stage, the performance of the new simulation results will be compared to the benchmark (stage a) and to other previous stages. Here we present preliminary validation results for stages (a)-(c) that test the performance when using time-dependent backgrounds.