Pursuing Forecasts of the Behavior and Arrival of Coronal Mass Ejections through Modeling and Observations

Abstract

Sophisticated instrumentation dedicated to studying and monitoring our Sun’s activity has proliferated in the past few decades, together with the increasing demand of specialized space weather forecasts that address the needs of commercial and government systems. As a result, theoretical and empirical models and techniques of increasing complexity have been developed, aimed at forecasting the occurrence of solar disturbances, their evolution, and time of arrival to Earth. Here we will review groundbreaking and recent methods to predict the propagation and evolution of coronal mass ejections and their driven shocks. The methods rely on a wealth of data sets provided by ground- and space-based observatories, involving remote-sensing observations of the corona and the heliosphere, as well as detections of radio waves.