Authors: J.T. Burkepile (NCAR/HAO), M. D. Galloy (NCAR/HAO), B. Berkey (NCAR/HAO), L. Perez-Gonzalez(NCAR/HAO), M. Cotter (NCAR/HAO), O.C. St. Cyr (NASA GSFC ret.), I.G. Richardson (NASA/GSFC), W. T. Thompson (NASA GSFC), M.L. Mays (NASA/CCMC), J. Jones (NASA/CCMC), P. R. Quinn (NASA/SRAG), R. Egeland (NASA/SRAG)
The NCAR Mauna Loa Solar Observatory (MLSO) COSMO K-Coronagraph (K-Cor) issues near-real time coronal mass ejection (CME) alerts to the community and to NASA’s Community Coordinated Modeling Center Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) scoreboard for use by the NASA Space Radiation Analysis Group in support of the Artemis mission. The COSMO K-Cor observes the low and middle solar corona in polarized broadband white light at very high time cadence and with very low data latency, making it ideally suited to study the onset and dynamics of coronal mass ejections (CMEs). The K-Cor automated data processing system includes CME detection code that can provide the first warning of an in-progress CME. This information can lead to improvements in SEP forecasts (see St. Cyr et al. 2017). We show that most of the K-Cor alerts were issued before the CME entered the LASCO field-of-view. When LASCO data latency is included, the K-Cor alerts provide, on average, tens of minutes to an hour warning of an in-progress CME before it can be seen in space-based coronagraph images. We discuss the CME detection system and present statistics on performance. We present ongoing work to improve performance and highlight the benefit of ground-based coronagraph network (ngGONG mission).