Automated Detection of Solar Eruptions

TL;DR

EruptionPatrol (EP) is an automated software tool that detects solar eruptions from SDO/AIA data, matching human annotations but with greater consistency, revealing eruption characteristics near the solar surface with specific speed distributions.

Contribution

The paper introduces EruptionPatrol, a novel automated method for identifying solar eruptions, improving consistency over visual detection and providing detailed eruption property analysis.

Findings

EP detects eruptions consistent with human annotations

Eruptions are within 15Mm of the solar surface

Eruption speeds range from 4 to 100 km/sec

Abstract

Observation of the solar atmosphere reveals a wide range of motions, from small scale jets and spicules to global-scale coronal mass ejections. Identifying and characterizing these motions are essential to advancing our understanding the drivers of space weather. Both automated and visual identifications are currently used in identifying CMEs. To date, eruptions near the solar surface (which may be precursors to CMEs) have been identified primarily by visual inspection. Here we report on EruptionPatrol (EP): a software module that is designed to automatically identify eruptions from data collected by SDO/AIA. We describe the method underlying the module and compare its results to previous identifications found in the Heliophysics Event Knowledgebase. EP identifies eruptions events that are consistent with those found by human annotations, but in a significantly more consistent and quantitative manner. Eruptions are found to be distributed within 15Mm of the solar surface. They possess peak speeds ranging from 4 to 100 km/sec and display a power-law probability distribution over that range. These characteristics are consistent with previous observations of prominences.