Propagation of the 7 January 2014 CME and Resulting Geomagnetic Non-Event

Abstract

On 7 January 2014 an X1.2 flare and CME with a radial speed $\approx$2500 km s${}^{-1}$ was observed from near an active region close to disk center. This led many forecasters to estimate a rapid arrival at Earth ($\approx$36 hours) and predict a strong geomagnetic storm. However, only a glancing CME arrival was observed at Earth with a transit time of $\approx$49 hours and a $K_{\mathrm{P}}$ geomagnetic index of only $3-$. We study the interplanetary propagation of this CME using the ensemble Wang-Sheeley-Arge (WSA)-ENLIL+Cone model, that allows a sampling of CME parameter uncertainties. We explore a series of simulations to isolate the effects of the background solar wind solution, CME shape, tilt, location, size, and speed, and the results are compared with observed in-situ arrivals at Venus, Earth, and Mars. Our results show that a tilted ellipsoid CME shape improves the initial real-time prediction to better reflect the observed in-situ signatures and the geomagnetic storm strength. CME parameters from the Graduated Cylindrical Shell model used as input to WSA--ENLIL+Cone, along with a tilted ellipsoid cloud shape, improve the arrival-time error by 14.5, 18.7, 23.4 hours for Venus, Earth, and Mars respectively. These results highlight that CME orientation and directionality with respect to observatories play an important role in understanding the propagation of this CME, and for forecasting other glancing CME arrivals. This study also demonstrates the importance of three-dimensional CME fitting made possible by multiple viewpoint imaging.

References in corpus (14)

• Confined and ejective eruptions of kink-unstable flux ropes
• Direct Detection of a CME-Associated Shock in LASCO White Light Images
• How Many CMEs Have Flux Ropes? Deciphering the Signatures of Shocks, Flux Ropes, and Prominences in Coronagraph Observations of CMEs
• Strong coronal channelling and interplanetary evolution of a solar storm up to Earth and Mars
• Ensemble modeling of CMEs using the WSA-ENLIL+Cone model
• Connecting speeds, directions and arrival times of 22 coronal mass ejections from the Sun to 1 AU
• Reconstructing CMEs with Coordinated Imaging and In Situ Observations: Global Structure, Kinematics, and Implications for Space Weather Forecasting
• The Confined X-class Flares of Solar Active Region 2192
• Influence of the ambient solar wind flow on the propagation behavior of interplanetary CMEs
• Quantitative Comparison of Methods for Predicting the Arrival of Coronal Mass Ejections at Earth based on multi-view imaging
• Predicting the magnetic vectors within coronal mass ejections arriving at Earth: 1. Initial Architecture
• Ground Level Enhancement in the 2014 January 6 Solar Energetic Particle Event
• Full Halo Coronal Mass Ejections: Arrival at the Earth
• Tracking the momentum flux of a CME and quantifying its influence on geomagnetically induced currents at Earth

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Investigating Mercury's Environment with the Two-Spacecraft BepiColombo Mission
• Coronal Magnetic Structure of Earthbound CMEs and In situ Comparison
• Benchmarking CME Arrival Time and Impact: Progress on Metadata, Metrics, and Events
• CMEs and SEPs During November-December 2020: A Challenge for Real-Time Space Weather Forecasting
• Forecasting the Ambient Solar Wind with Numerical Models. II. An Adaptive Prediction System for Specifying Solar Wind Speed Near the Sun
• Collection, Collation, and Comparison of 3D Coronal CME Reconstructions
• Using ForeCAT Deflections and Rotations to Constrain the Early Evolution of CMEs
• Using gradient boosting regression to improve ambient solar wind model predictions
• Doppler speeds of the hydrogen Lyman lines in solar flares from EVE
• Kinematical properties of coronal mass ejections
• Low geo-effectiveness of fast halo CMEs related to the 12 X-class flares in 2002
• A comparison of the impacts of CMEs and CIRs on the Martian dayside and nightside ionospheric species
• Improved modelling of SEP event onset within the WSA-Enlil-SEPMOD framework
• A coronal mass ejection encountered by four spacecraft within 1 au from the Sun: Ensemble modelling of propagation and magnetic structure
• Modeling CME encounters at Parker Solar Probe with OSPREI: Dependence on photospheric and coronal conditions
• Trajectories of Coronal Mass Ejection from Solar-type Stars
• On the analysis of eruptive events with non-radial evolution