CME Arrival Time and Impact Working Team: Events & Initial Results

Of the four events, two will be hits, one problematic hit, and one false alarm. The two hits will overlap with the IMF Bz working team’s event list to reduce the overall modeling burden (for those models that predict both arrival and Bz). If desired, the CME parameters provided below may be used as model input.

A) 3 April 2010 10:33 UT (hit)
B) 15 March 2013 07:12 UT (hit)
C) 15 March 2015 01:48 UT (hit; problematic, many models predict a late arrival)
D) 7 January 2014 18:24 UT (false alarm; only a weak discontinuity arrives)

Larger set of events: The selection of a larger set of 100 events is currently under discussion. Please fill out the survey with your thoughts. During the April 2014 meeting, we agreed to take a set of 100 events for statistical significance. Both users as well as scientists agreed that all types of CMEs should be taken into account, but we shall flag each of the CMEs into their corresponding category for later use and statistics.

For the CME arrival time and plasma parameters from observations, the following has been proposed:
- CME arrival time will be taken from current existing CME catalogues. For the cases where the CME can be found in multiple catalogues, a random catalogue will be chosen.
- 1 hour averaged OMNI data will be used for solar wind impact parameters such as the peak of the density/velocity.

As our goal is to see where each model stands and what arrival and solar wind parameters at impact of your model are underperforming, and which are performing well, so that we can advance and improve our models, we would like to fix the model input for the 100 events.

We have come up with the following proposal:
- Each model will provide results for the 100 events for the fixed input parameters that are provided by the 3D CME kinematics team as well as fixed magnetogram. The 3D CME kinematics team will provide the GCS model inputs. In case your model does not use such input, or slightly adjusted input, an “in-between” program/algorithm may be used to process the provided input parameters. This will only be acceptable if all 100 parameters are processed in the exact same manner.
- For those models that cannot provide results for all 100 events, a subset will be provided.
- Optionally, modelers can also submit the 100 events for their best parameters.
- There will be an extra (smaller) set with events that have CME observations at other 1AU spacecraft. It is not necessary for the models to perform their validation on this set. However, it is highly appreciated as it will leave us with a quantification of how well we can perform compared to observations at Earth.

In agreement with the IMF Bz team, we will have some event overlap so that we can lower the burden for those models that are providing data/model outputs for both teams. Considerations for event selection:
  ✳  Single CME events (fast and slow)
  ✳  Should we include multiple CME events (interacting and non-interacting) in the initial set?
  ✳  CME events that are expected to arrive but do not (false alarm)
  ✳  Flank impact CME events
  ✳  Consider events from the ISEST WG4 wiki page
  ✳  Overlap some events with the IMF Bz and L1 working team.

CME Parameters for initial event set

Optional CME Parameters for core 4 event subset

Results for core 4 event subset
  ✳  Enhanced drag-based model (Hess & Zhang) [set 1 results]
  ✳  SARM (Núñez) [set 1 results]
  ✳  WSA-ENLIL+Cone (Arge, Odstrcil) [set 1 results]

Summary Tables

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