The service for Automated WARnings of Earth arrivals (AWARE) detects and displays arrival of potentially geo-effective solar wind disturbances, i.e. which might produce a geomagnetic storm. Apart from operations based on spacecraft in L1, the service also works for the NASA STEREO A spacecraft. Taking as input the near-realtime in situ observations of the interplanetary magnetic field and solar wind plasma from the IMPACT/MAG and PLASTIC instruments kindly provided the University of California, the University of New Hampshire and NASA (see below). The arrivals at STEREO A are displayed on top of the solar wind time series. The top curve shows the interplanetary magnetic field, with the total intensity in black and the Bz-component in brown. The middle curve shows the solar wind speed v. These parameters are well known to be the most important for the geo-effectiveness of the storms.
Significant interplanetary shocks are displayed as red vertical lines. Time intervals of solar wind disturbance are marked with background shading. Disturbances due to solar eruptions, i.e. Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), classified as Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejections (ICMEs) are marked with the orange color shown at the top of the display. Disturbances created at the front edge of high-speed streams as they interact with the surrounding solar wind, i.e. classified as Co-rotating Interaction Regions or just Stream Interaction Regions (CIRs/SIRs), are marked with the blue background shading. If such disturbances has arrived within the last 24 hours, the message “Alert: ICME arrived within the last 24 hours” or “Alert: CIR arrived within the last 24 hours” are shown above the display.
Disturbances where the classification is more uncertain are displayed in lighter orange and blue colors. If the disturbance cannot be automatically classified, it is displayed in grey. If such disturbances have arrived within the last 24 hours, the message “Alert: Disturbance has arrived within the last 24 hours” will appear.
In general the classification scheme is based on the plasma- and magnetic field observations in the disturbance. In the case of loss of plasma data, an alternative classification method has been developed, based only on magnetic field observation, the so-called B-only classification. "Equivalent Kp predictions are not made in this case.
Independently of the classification of disturbed intervals (background markings) each hour of solar wind observations are analyzed separately to determine the most likely solar origin of that material (Xu and Borovsky, 2015). If/when it is part of a possible CME-ejecta it is marked with a pink dot, and if it is part of high-speed stream material from a coronal hole it is marked with a light-blue dot.
The bottom curve shows a prediction of the "Equivalent" geomagnetic activity Kp, had Earth been located an hour downstream of STEREO A. When the equivalent Kp reaches storm levels (i.e. Kp≥5) it is displayed with a red marking.

An automatically updated list of arrived shocks and disturbances is available at: Data The file contains the events that have been detected by AWARE the last three days (Format). If no events were detected the last 3 days the latest detection is displayed.

References

Acknowledgement

The STEREO near real time solar wind data was kindly provided by the IMPACT and PLASTIC instrument teams and NASA:
The IMPACT team is led by the Space Science Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, PI J. Luhmann, sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/impact, and is supported by NASA’s Heliophysics division. The IMPACT magnetometer was provided by NASA GSFC, with data processing at UCLA. The PLASTIC team is led by the University of New Hampshire, PI T. Galvin, stereo.sr.unh.edu, and is supported by NASAs Heliophysics Division.

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