Thursday

There are various eruptions in the solar atmosphere and from these the flares and CMEs are gigantic energy explosions. Solar flares can have a major impact on life and modern technological infrastructure present in Space or on Earth. After a shot historic introduction and outlining the underlying physics, we present new insights into pre-flare and Coronal Mass Ejection behaviour and the evolution of the magnetically most dynamics regions, also referred to as Active Regions (ARs), of the Sun. We demonstrate how analysing joint satellite and ground-based data (e.g. SOHO/MDI-Debrecen Data (SDD) and the SDO/HMI - Debrecen Data (HMIDD) sunspot catalogues) may bring us further in resolving a more accurate Space Weather forecast. We embark on our novel method that has the potential to make a leap forward as it is employed to flare and CME prediction.

Our new approach is based on the weighted horizontal gradient of magnetic field (WG_M) defined between opposite polarity spot-groups at the polarity inversion line of ARs. This parameter gives, as we will demonstrate, important diagnostic information not only (i) towards a more accurate prediction of eruption onset time, and (ii) on the flare intensity but also provides new insight (iii) into CME risk assessment from C class to the X class flares. We discuss our findings and highlight some potential future directions that may really help us towards a better and more reliable pre-flare and CME monitoring and further analysis.