Automated detection of coronaL MAss ejecta origiNs for space weather AppliCations (ALMANAC)

TL;DR

This paper introduces ALMANAC, an automated method for detecting and estimating the origin of coronal mass ejections in EUV solar data, aiming to improve space weather alerts and forecasting accuracy.

Contribution

ALMANAC is a novel automated technique that estimates CME eruption locations and directions from EUV data, integrated with space weather prediction tools.

Findings

Mean deviance in source coordinates within 37 minutes and 11 degrees.

Applied successfully to 20 halo CMEs from SDO/AIA data.

Provides a foundation for automated CME alert systems.

Abstract

Alerts of potentially hazardous coronal mass ejections (CME) are based on the detection of rapid changes in remote observations of the solar atmosphere. This paper presents a method that detects and estimates the central coordinates of CME eruptions in Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) data, with the dual aim of providing an early alert, and giving an initial estimate of the CME direction of propagation to a CME geometrical model. In particular, we plan to link the ALMANAC method to the CME detection and characterisation module of the Space Weather Empirical Ensemble Package (SWEEP), which is a fully automated modular software package for operational space weather capability currently being developed for the UK Meteorological Office. In this work, ALMANAC is applied to observations by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) aboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). As well as presenting the method, a proof of concept test is made on a limited set of data associated with twenty halo CMEs recorded by the Coordinated Data Analysis Workshop (CDAW) catalogue near the activity maximum of solar cycle 24. SDO/AIA data for each event is processed at 6 minute cadence to identify the on-disk location and time of each CME. The absolute mean deviance between the ALMANAC and CDAW source event coordinates are within 37.05 +- 29.71 minutes and 11.01 +- 10.39 degrees. These promising results give a solid foundation for future work, and will provide initial constraints to an automated CME alert and forecasting system.