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How long ahead of time can one forecast these events?


Realistically only about half an hour. There are instruments at the L1 lagrange point that can measure the properties of the solar wind and/or CME as they pass and allowed real informed responses to events.

There are also very, very simplified CME propagation models (WSA-ENLIL, etc) that can start with some assumptions and give a reasonable idea about when the CME will arrive within ~12 hours.

But for every time the simulations succesfully predict severe geomagnetic events or the like they give false positives a couple dozen times. The simulations cannot predict the geoeffectiveness.




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