Last Updated: 09/13/2023

SEP Validation Team

About

Team Leads: K. Whitman, P. Quinn, H. Bain, I.G. Richardson, M.L. Mays

SEP Scoreboard Leads: M. Dierckxsens, M.L. Mays

Communications:
See the ISWAT team page for an up to date list of participants.

Latest News

➡ COSPAR ISWAT: This team is now also a COSPAR ISWAT Team: https://www.iswat-cospar.org/h3-01
➡ Current SHINE 2020-2021 and ESWW SEP Modeling Challenge: the team is soliciting model outputs, see the challenge website for more details
➡ SHINE 2019 SEP Modeling Challenge (Research to Operations): session summary and analysis of submitted results
➡ SHINE and ESWW 2018 community campaign: session presentations and summary
➡ April 2017 working meeting: team agenda [PDF] | solar/heliosphere agenda [PDF] | full agenda

User Needs

What are the requirements of different users, e.g. satellite operators, aviation and ground-based services?

  • What can or should be forecast? Current models mostly focus on predicting the GOES >10 MeV proton flux but certain users may be interested in higher energies or heavier ions.
  • Probabilistic forecasts for 24 hour intervals 1-3 days ahead.
  • Estimation of SEP effects in retrospective sense are needed for aviation.
  • Models that are advanced enough for actionable forecasts.

Working Team Goals

  • Evaluate how well different models/techniques can predict historical SEP events throughout the heliosphere.
  • Establish metrics agreed upon by the community
  • Provide a benchmark against which future models can be assessed against
  • Complementary to the SEP Scoreboard activity whose goal is collect and display real-time SEP predictions and ultimately facilitate validation.

Potential Questions to Address

Where do we stand with SEP prediction?

  • Using case studies of selected events, can we assess where we stand with SEP prediction?
  • How well can the success of SEP models be compared? Is it possible to identify a uniform metric?
  • How do we move beyond using case studies for model/data comparisons?

List of Time Intervals in this Study — under discussion

  • Proposed: October 2011 – June 2012
    Considerations:
  • Consider a training set, validation set, and test set. The test set would not be revealed until a later stage and model parameter tweaking would not be allowed.
  • Time period should have some overlap with Radiation & Plasma Effects working teams: SEEs, Total Dose, Radiation effects for aviation.
  • Time period should include STEREO (to have good CME and SEP observations).
  • Initially Focus on SEP events at Earth, later expand to multi-spacecraft even periods
  • Have a mix of events: ones that cross certain thresholds, and ones that do not.
  • What energy range should be used to select events?

Resources, Presentations, and Past Progress

Sections in this page