Delivering a Solar Flare Forecast Model that Improves Flare Forecast (Timing and Magnitude) Accuracy by 25%

Many activities and technological systems prevalent in today’s society – air traffic control and air travel, the power grids, communications, deep-water drilling operations, human spaceflight – are vulnerable to the effects of sudden flares from our Sun. Because the propagation speed for flare emission is the speed of light, it is necessary to forecast these events in order to mitigate their effects. The objectives of this project are 1) to validate the performance of an automated flare forecasting technique that parameterizes observations of solar magnetic fields and subsurface flows determined from helioseismology, then uses Discriminant Analysis to make a prediction, and 2) to assess the feasibility of this technique as an operational model. The quantitative use of magnetic field observations, subsurface flows and Discriminant Analysis are all innovations not presently used by the NOAA/Space Weather Prediction Center.