Analysis of SEP events and their possible precursors based on the GSEP Catalog

Abstract

Solar energetic particle (SEP) events are one of the most crucial aspects of space weather. Their prediction depends on various factors including the source solar eruptions such as flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). The Geostationary Solar Energetic Particle (GSEP) Events catalog was developed as an extensive data set towards this effort for solar cycles 22, 23 and 24. In the present work, we review and extend the GSEP data set by; (1) adding "weak" SEP events that have proton enhancements from 0.5 to 10 pfu in the E>10 MeV channel, and (2) improving the associated solar source eruptions information. We analyze and discuss spatio-temporal properties such as flare magnitudes, locations, rise times, and speed and width of CMEs. We check for the correlation of these parameters with peak proton fluxes and event fluences. Our study also focuses on understanding feature importance towards the optimal performance of machine learning (ML) models for SEP event forecasting. We implement random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), logistic regression (LR) and support vector machines (SVM) classifiers in a binary classification schema. Based on the evaluation of our best models, we find both the flare and CME parameters are requisites to predict the occurrence of an SEP event. This work is a foundation for our further efforts on SEP event forecasting using robust ML methods.