Collection, Collation, and Comparison of 3D Coronal CME Reconstructions

TL;DR

This paper introduces LLAMACoRe, an online database compiling 3D CME reconstructions from multiple catalogs, providing a comprehensive resource for assessing uncertainties and trends in coronal mass ejection properties over solar cycles.

Contribution

It creates and demonstrates a continually updated, integrated catalog of CME reconstructions from 24 sources, enabling systematic comparison and uncertainty analysis.

Findings

Typical reconstruction differences: 4.0° in latitude, 8.0° in longitude.

Reproduces known solar cycle trends in CME properties.

Identifies more outliers during solar maximum.

Abstract

Predicting the impacts of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) is a major focus of current space weather forecasting efforts. Typically, CME properties are reconstructed from stereoscopic coronal images and then used to forward model a CME's interplanetary evolution. Knowing the uncertainty in the coronal reconstructions is then a critical factor in determining the uncertainty of any predictions. A growing number of catalogs of coronal CME reconstructions exist, but no extensive comparison between these catalogs has yet been performed. Here we develop a Living List of Attributes Measured in Any Coronal Reconstruction (LLAMACoRe), an online collection of individual catalogs, which we intend to continually update. In this first version, we use results from 24 different catalogs with 3D reconstructions using STEREO observations between 2007--2014. We have collated the individual catalogs, determining which reconstructions correspond to the same events. LLAMACoRe contains 2954 reconstructions for 1862 CMEs. Of these, 511 CMEs contain multiple reconstructions from different catalogs. Using the best-constrained values for each CME, we find that the combined catalog reproduces the generally known solar cycle trends. We determine the typical difference we would expect between two independent reconstructions of the same event and find values of 4.0 deg in the latitude, 8.0 deg in the longitude, 24.0 deg in the tilt, 9.3 deg in the angular width, 0.1 in the shape parameter kappa, 115 km/s in the velocity, and 2.5e15 g in the mass. These remain the most probable values over the solar cycle, though we find more extreme outliers in the deviation toward solar maximum.