Yes / A workshop was recently held at Nagoya University (31 October – 02 November
2017), sponsored by the Center for International Collaborative Research, at the Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research, Nagoya University, Japan, to quantitatively compare the performance of today’s operational solar flare forecasting facilities.
Building upon Paper I of this series (Barnes et al. 2016), in Paper II (Leka et al. 2019)
we described the participating methods for this latest comparison effort, the evaluation methodology, and presented quantitative comparisons. In this paper we focus on
the behavior and performance of the methods when evaluated in the context of broad
implementation differences. Acknowledging the short testing interval available and the
small number of methods available, we do find that forecast performance: 1) appears to
improve by including persistence or prior flare activity, region evolution, and a human
“forecaster in the loop”; 2) is hurt by restricting data to disk-center observations; 3)
may benefit from long-term statistics, but mostly when then combined with modern
data sources and statistical approaches. These trends are arguably weak and must be
viewed with numerous caveats, as discussed both here and in Paper II. Following this
present work, we present in Paper IV a novel analysis method to evaluate temporal
patterns of forecasting errors of both types (i.e., misses and false alarms; Park et al.
2019). Hence, most importantly, with this series of papers we demonstrate the techniques for facilitating comparisons in the interest of establishing performance-positive
methodologies. / We wish to acknowledge funding from the Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research, Nagoya University for supporting the workshop and its participants. We would also like to acknowledge the “big picture” perspective brought by Dr. M. Leila Mays during her participation in the workshop. K.D.L. and G.B. acknowledge that the DAFFS and DAFFS-G tools were developed under NOAA SBIR contracts WC-133R-13-CN-0079 (Phase-I) and WC-133R-14-CN-0103 (PhaseII) with additional support from Lockheed-Martin Space Systems contract #4103056734 for Solar-B FPP Phase E support. A.E.McC. was supported by an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship. D.S.B. and M.K.G were supported by the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 640216 (FLARECAST project; http://flarecast.eu). MKG also acknowledges research performed under the A-EFFort project and subsequent service implementation, supported under ESA Contract number 4000111994/14/D/ MPR. S. A. M. is supported by the Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme and the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research award FA9550-17-1-039. The operational Space Weather services of ROB/SIDC are partially funded through the STCE, a collaborative framework funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/17366 |
| Date | 08 October 2019 |
| Creators | Leka, K.D., Park, S-H., Kusano, K., Andries, J., Barnes, G., Bingham, S., Bloomfield, D.S., McCloskey, A.E., Delouille, V., Falconer, D., Gallagher, P.T., Georgoulis, M.K., Kubo, Y., Lee, K., Lee, S., Lobzin, V., Mun, J., Murray, S.A., Nageem, T.A.M.H., Qahwaji, Rami S.R., Sharpe, M., Steenburgh, R., Steward, G., Terkilsden, M. |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, Accepted manuscript |
| Rights | © 2019 American Astronomical Association. Reproduced in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
| Relation | https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ab2e11 |
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