Improving the reliability of solar wind predictions for Earth – WindTRUST

Space weather is becoming an increasingly critical issue in our growing technological societies, both for civil society and for military applications. With daily effects applying to satellites, communications and electrical installations, and potential damage amounting to several trillion of dollars in the event of extreme events, it is more urgent than ever to be able to predict solar activity. At present, however, France is neither in a position to adapt to the most intense periods of activity, which are more likely to lead to the most disruptive events, nor even to quantify the reliability of the forecasts it receives and produces. The WindTRUST project is designed to fill these gaps and enable France to maintain its international positioning and strategic sovereignty. It is based on the improvement of numerical forecasting simulations, and in particular the first link in the chain of simulations, dedicated to the Sun's magnetic atmosphere and its wind. These codes produce essential data for all models concerned with the Earth's space environment, and are often poorly understood by forecasters and Earth specialists. This project is based on two innovative and crucial axes: improving the ability of coronal models to handle the most extreme events using data assimilation mechanisms, and creating a validation pipeline enabling, for the first time in the world, an automatic reliability score to be provided for each forecast. This will enable industrial and military users to assess the credibility of each forecast they receive, and allow the scientific community to evaluate its strengths and areas for reinforcement to meet France's operational needs. It will produce several deliverables that will be brought up to TRL 4 level (alpha version with a laboratory demonstrator), which can then be integrated into ESA's VSWMC (Virtual Space Weather Modeling Center) to enhance the reliability of European forecasts. The products in question will be: a coronal model with data assimilation capable of connecting to the rest of the numerical chain and handling forecasts of the most variable events; an operational version of the Wind Predict-AW model, which is currently the best-performing French coronal model; a fully automated validation pipeline applicable to all coronal codes used within the VSWMC. They will be developed thanks to the funding of a thesis and a post-doctoral contract. Supervision will be provided by AIM at CEA Paris-Saclay. The project coordinator is Dr. Barbara Perri, a space weather expert recruited specifically for this project by AIM, and co-leader of the ISWAT solar wind model validation team. The project partners are Dr. Allan Sacha Brun of AIM (member of the GCME), Dr. Antoine Strugarek of AIM (co-developer of the Wind Predict code and expert in solar flare forecasting) and Dr. Victor Réville (developer of Wind Predict-AW and expert in space weather tools for the STORMS center in Toulouse). These codes will thus be sufficiently mature to be integrated into future ESA daily forecasts, and will be made available to all French industrial and military partners wishing to make use of them. This project is particularly timely given the approach of maximum solar activity around 2025, and the threat of a future Carrington event in the years ahead. This work was also the subject of a presentation at the Innovation Defense Lab in Balard on July 10, 2023, to raise awareness of the digital challenges involved in assessing the consequences on Earth.