Testing and Improving a Set of Morphological Predictors of Flaring Activity

Abstract

Efficient prediction of solar flares relies on parameters that quantify the eruptive capability of solar active regions. Several such quantitative predictors have been proposed in the literature, inferred mostly from photospheric magnetograms and/or white-light observations. Two of them are the Ising energy and the sum of the total horizontal magnetic field gradient. The former has been developed from line-of-sight magnetograms, while the latter uses sunspot detections and characteristics, based on continuum images. Aiming to include these parameters in an automated prediction scheme, we test their applicability on regular photospheric magnetic field observations provided by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) instrument onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). We test their efficiency as predictors of flaring activity on a representative sample of active regions and investigate possible modifications of these quantities. The Ising energy appears to be an efficient predictor, and the efficiency is even improved if it is modified to describe interacting magnetic partitions or sunspot umbrae. The sum of the horizontal magnetic field gradient appears to be slightly more promising than the three variations of the Ising energy we implement in this article. The new predictors are also compared with two very promising predictors: the effective connected magnetic field strength and the total unsigned non-neutralized current. Our analysis shows that the efficiency of morphological predictors depends on projection effects in a nontrivial way. All four new predictors are found useful for inclusion in an automated flare forecasting facility, such as the Flare Likelihood and Region Eruption Forecasting (FLARECAST), but their utility, among others, will ultimately be determined by the validation effort underway in the framework of the FLARECAST project.

References in corpus (9)

• The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) Vector Magnetic Field Pipeline: SHARPs -- Space-weather HMI Active Region Patches
• The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) Vector Magnetic Field Pipeline: Overview and Performance
• Forecasting Solar Flares Using Magnetogram-based Predictors and Machine Learning
• On-line Tools for Solar Data Compiled at the Debrecen Observatory and their Extensions with the Greenwich Sunspot Data
• Non-neutralized electric currents in solar active regions and flare productivity
• Pulsations in the Earth's Lower Ionosphere Synchronized with Solar Flare Emission
• The nonpotentiality of coronae of solar active regions, the dynamics of the surface magnetic field, and the potential for large flares
• Active Region Photospheric Magnetic Properties Derived from Line-of-sight and Radial Fields
• Automatic Detection of Magnetic delta in Sunspot Groups

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Feature ranking of active region source properties in solar flare forecasting and the uncompromised stochasticity of flare occurrence
• Which Photospheric Characteristics are Most Relevant to Active-Region Coronal Mass Ejections?
• Leveraging the Mathematics of Shape for Solar Magnetic Eruption Prediction
• The characteristics of flare- and CME-productive solar active regions
• A New Space Weather Tool for Identifying Eruptive Active Regions
• Solar active region evolution and imminent flaring activity through a color-coded visualization of photospheric vector magnetograms
• Segmentation of spectroscopic images of the low solar atmosphere by the Self Organizing Map technique
• Time Series Analysis of Photospheric Magnetic Parameters of Flare-quiet versus Flaring Active Regions: Scaling Properties of Fluctuations
• Solar activity classification based on Mg II spectra: towards classification on compressed data
• Near-continuous tracking of solar active region NOAA 13664 over three solar rotations
• Evaluating Pointing Strategies for Future Solar Flare Missions