First Results from NASA’s Ongoing SEP Model Validation (SEPVAL) Effort

Authors: Kathryn Whitman (KBR), Philip Quinn (Leidos), Ricky Egeland (NASA JSC), Luke Stegeman (Leidos), and Clayton Allison (Leidos) and the ISEP Project

The Integrated Solar Energetic Proton Alert/Warning (ISEP) project is a collaboration between NASA Johnson’s Space Radiation Analysis Group (SRAG), NASA Goddard’s Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC), and NASA Goddard’s Moon to Mars Space Weather Analysis Office (M2M). ISEP has developed the SEP Scoreboards that are currently providing real time forecasts of SEP events and used for situational awareness in SRAG’s space radiation operations. The availability of real time forecasts inspires the need for a full validation of model performance, both to understand the likely performance of forecasts and to understand the current state-of-the-art of the SEP modeling field. SRAG and the ISEP team have been leading an SEP model validation effort since 2018 with the collaboration of model developers from institutions across the U.S., Europe, and around the world through the SHINE, ESWW, and SEPVAL workshops and ISWAT working group H3-01. The newly developed SEP model validation tools, SPHINX and VIVID, are providing a quantitative evaluation of SEP model performance. First results from the SEPVAL 2023 challenge and for the real time SEP Scoreboards are presented.