Wednesday

Solar flares can be considered initiating events for many Space Weather phenomena/impacts, and are directly tied to radiation storms and ionospheric-layer disruption. While solar flares are perhaps not the direct cause of other serious Space-Weather impacts, they do serve as an identified initiation to the related solar- and heliospheric-based processes that more directly cause such problems. Predicting solar flares from active region observations has thus long been a well-defined and required operational product, now with several facilities world-wide providing operational forecasts to a variety of end users. Evaluating the performance of operational forecasting methods was the subject of a recent workshop held at Nagoya University Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research through its Center for International Collaborative Research. Using a variety of quantitative metrics the team examined the overall performance, but more importantly we have sought to ask why certain methods and implementations perform better than others, and how to best evaluate this question in the first place. In this talk I will summarize the group's findings including performance differences resulting from both methodology and data, and especially highlight the findings that may improve operational forecasting in the future.