Removal of false alarms from solar wind predictions

Abstract

<p>Solar wind propagation models using in situ plasma observations as input can be improved by removing the signatures of Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejections (ICMEs) from the input data. ICMEs are sporadic events that propagate in a given direction, hence their signatures in the plasma data should not be extrapolated to other heliocentric longitudes. As a result, in order to improve the prediction accuracy these should be filtered out. We create dedicated ICME lists providing the exact start and end times of ICMEs to numerous space probes such as ACE, STEREO A&B, SOHO, WIND, SolO, PSP, DSCOVER, VEX, MEX, Rosetta, BepiColombo, MAVEN and Messenger. We provide solar wind plasma and magnetic field predictions to any inner heliospheric position applying the ICME filter on the input dataset this way eliminating false alarms such as false ICME signature forecasts. Our corrected predictions contribute to the investigation of the background solar wind and related fields.</p>