| Presentation Title: | Real-Time Early Flare Alert System for Triggered Observations |
| Author(s): | Juliana Vievering, P. S. Athiray, Juan Camilo Buitrago-Casas, Phillip Chamberlin, Kristopher Cooper, Gordon Emslie, Lindsay Glesener, Vicki Herde, Hugh Hudson, Paolo Massa, Marianne Peterson, Katharine K. Reeves, Sabrina Savage, Amy Winebarger |
Abstract:
Understanding when and where a flare will occur continues to be an important goal for the heliophysics community, relevant to fundamental research, coordinated flare observations, and space weather applications. Currently available flare forecasts typically fall into one of two categories: 1) long-term probabilistic forecasts (e.g., probability that an M-class flare will occur in the next 24 hours), or 2) flare alerts (e.g., notification when the flare flux reaches a high level). For a wide variety of research and operational purposes, there is an additional need for an early flare alert system to anticipate large and long-lasting flares that is more actionable than long-term forecasts and provides earlier notice than current flare alerts do. Such a tool would enable triggered observations of the early stages of solar flares, a crucial capability for demonstrating novel instrumentation optimized for solar flares via sounding rockets and other observing campaigns aimed at flares. With this goal in mind, a collection of tools was developed and implemented for the first solar sounding rocket flare campaign in April 2024, featuring the FOXSI-4 and Hi-C Flare experiments. Here we present on the real-time early flare alert system which supported these sounding rocket teams through a successful and unprecedented solar-flare-triggered sounding rocket launch and plans for continued development of these tools.