What Are the Challenges to Space-Weather Forecasting?
What Are We Learning About the Sun from Data-Driven Modeling?
  A Specific Challenge: January 2014

Oral and Poster Sessions are Scheduled for Friday, 19 December, 2014 at the Fall 2014 AGU Meeting
   Convenors: Todd Hoeksema, Rebekah Evans, Aimee Norton, Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla

Severe space weather can pose serious threats to modern technologies and space travelers. Information about events such as flares, coronal mass ejections, magnetic clouds, and shocks can provide insight into variations of the space environment, be used to develop empirical models, and set constrains for physics-based models for space weather predictions.

A primary goal of data-driven models is to understand solar events and their interplanetary and terrestrial consequences. Techniques range from simple and heuristic to comprehensive and dynamic. Input can be a single observation or require assimilation of multiple quantities mapped in four dimensions. Output can be an intermediate product or detailed global predictions. This session challenges us to think beyond the mechanics and share insights about how the system really works.

Forecasts have been improving, but sometimes fail. Some talks in this session focus on what have we learned from the curious events of January 2014.

Event Description

• Well developed NOAA region 11944 (HARP 3563) rotated onto the disk on 1 January, 2014 and crossed disk center on 7 January.
• The region between AR 11943 and decaying AR 11944 was the site of an X1.2 flare near disk center at ~18:00 UT on 7 January, e.g. AIA 193 and 304.
• An asymmetric halo CME was observed shortly after expanding into the heliosphere.
• Despite expectations, the ejecta apparently missed Earth. (Search this link for 2014-01-07 for predictions).
• NOAA's space weather highlights for the week of 06-12 provide good context information.

Shared Links

Check below for links to resources and results related to this session.

Link	Description
NEW
	HMI Vector Field for AR 11944 (HARP 3563) with bad pixels adjusted (Y. Liu and X. Sun)
Context
	Solar Monitor Web page for 7 January 2014
	Magnetogram Movie from HMI for 2014.01.06-07 (Other movies for that day)
	HMI HARP-region Movie for January 2014
	Difference Movie in AIA 193 (courtesy Nariaka Nitta) Also: Other Events Hi-Res
	Composite 12h Movie of HMI Magnetogram and AIA 171 from the SDO Data Browser
	HMI Synoptic Maps for Carrington Rotation 2145 (png)
	SOHO/LASCO Coronagraph observation announcement and links e.g. C2 Difference Movie
	HARP 3563 CEA Limb-to-limb Radial Magnetic Field movie, 2013.12.30-2014.01.15, also Continuum Intensity (A. Norton).
	Composite AIA/HMI close-up 4h movie showing flare loops (courtesy Mark Cheung)

Contact Todd@sun.stanford.edu to share a link with other contributors to this session.

J.T. Hoeksema