<p><BR/>Replying to:<BR/><DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>The events we've seen since the 12th have got me thinking a lot about CME prediction. It does not seem to be the case that sunspot activity is particularly useful for CME prediction. It seems as though all CME's tend to originate from one of the active areas that can be seen in the iron ion wavelengths (171, 195, 284A). As a general rule of thumb, the more active the region, the more likely it is to produce a CME and/or a sunspot, but that certainly is not always the case. On the 14th for instance, a smaller area, pretty much directly to the left of primary active region also triggered a "small" flare-like event, pretty much the same size as the one the came from the primary active area a few hours later. On the other hand, both of the "bigger" CME events this week came from the primary active region, and that side of the sun did in fact "light up" this week in the 195A image, with several new "hot spots" of activity. I find myself constantly checking the geos x-ray flux monitor in the morning when I wake up, and then watching the SOHO 195A images to see where the flare occured when I've find something in the x-ray flux monitor of interest. <br /> Posted by michaelmozina</DIV></p><p>This kind of stuff is still a very active area of research but everyone is leaning toward the side of there not being any correlation between CMEs/geomagnetic storms here at Earth and any properties of the solar wind. Like I've mentioned before, last summer I looked at every storm I could find from 1994-2006(I wrote an automated routine that went through the relativistic electron flux data and identified approximately 1 per day) and ran it through a neural network, trying to find a correlation between when they occurred/how strong they were/how long they were and various solar wind properties such as speed, density, magnetic field components, the degree that the magnetotail was stretched, etc, as well as general measurements of solar activity, and things like the DST index(a total of 18 parameters). There were no correlations whatsoever. We also divided that year interval up into solar min/ascending phase/max/descending and there isn't really even much of a dependence on the number of storms on the phase. I believe most of the storms occurred during the descending phase but all of them were pretty close.</p><p>If anyone does finally "crack the code" eventually though, it will be huge. </p> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>
</p><p> </p> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds. - Kristian Birkeland </div>
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram