Flare forecasting at the Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre

Abstract

The Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre produces 24/7/365 space weather guidance, alerts, and forecasts to a wide range of government and commercial end users across the United Kingdom. Solar flare forecasts are one of its products, which are issued multiple times a day in two forms; forecasts for each active region on the solar disk over the next 24 hours, and full-disk forecasts for the next four days. Here the forecasting process is described in detail, as well as first verification of archived forecasts using methods commonly used in operational weather prediction. Real-time verification available for operational flare forecasting use is also described. The influence of human forecasters is highlighted, with human-edited forecasts outperforming original model results, and forecasting skill decreasing over longer forecast lead times.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in Space Weather. 18 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables

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• Solar Flares Forecasting Using Time Series and Extreme Gradient Boosting Ensembles
• Ensemble Forecasting of Major Solar Flares: Methods for Combining Models
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• The Flare Likelihood and Region Eruption Forecasting (FLARECAST) Project: Flare forecasting in the big data & machine learning era