Designing the Real-time Nowcast/forecast Pipeline for SEP Events in the Inner Heliosphere

Authors: Junxiang Hu (UAH), Gang Li (UAH), Claudio Corti (NASA CCMC), Clayton Allison (NASA SRAG), M. Leila Mays (NASA CCMC)

Solar Energetic Particles (SEP) are the most hazardous space weather events in the inner heliosphere. Predicting SEP intensities in real time before their impact on Earth and other observatories is one of the critical missions in space weather forecasting. In this work, we utilize the improved Particle Acceleration and Transport in the Heliosphere (iPATH) model to design a real-time SEP forecasting/nowcasting pipeline for the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) and SEP scoreboard. We will discuss how we set up periodic background solar wind simulations, event-triggered CME simulations from real-time CME or flare databases, and suprathermal seed population input from observations for particle acceleration at the CME-driven shocks. We will present recent progress in describing the turbulent transport of accelerated energetic particles in the inner heliosphere. We will also show the validation results for this pipeline using a wide variety of historical events.