Drag based forecast for CME arrival

Sammanfattning:           Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are considered to be one of the most energetic events in the heliosphere. Capable of inducing geomagnetic storms on Earth that can cause damage to electronics, a pillar which the modern society we live in leans heavily upon. Being able to accurately predict the arrival of CMEs would present us with the ability to issue timely warnings to authorities and commercial actors, allowing for protective measures to be put in place minimizing the damage. In this study the predicted arrival times and speeds from the Drag Based Model (DBM) and Drag Based Ensemble Model (DBEM) were compared to observational data from a set of 12 events containing fast, Earth-directed Halo CMEs and their corresponding shocks. Although DBM was developed to model CME propagation, varying some parameters allow it to be used for estimating shock/sheath arrival. The results presented in this study indicate that on average DBM performs best when the drag-parameter γ is in the range 0.2 ≤ γ ≤ 0.3. However the variability in the results show that determining a universal value of γ for fast CMEs does not increase the consistency in the model's performance. For completeness, further investigation is needed to account for not only halo CMEs. This will allow to test broader range of variation in the DBEM input parameters.