Abstract
J. Schmidt and Cairns (2019) have recently shown that they can predict
Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) arrival times with an accuracy of 0.9+-1.9
hours for four separate events. They also showed that the accuracy gets
better with
increased grid resolution. Here, we further improve these results by
using the Richardson extrapolation (Richardson and Gaunt, 1927), which
is a standard technique in computational fluid dynamics, and predict the
CME arrival time
with 0.2+-0.26 hours accuracy. The CME arrival time errors of the new
model lie in a 95% confidence interval
[-0.21,0.61] h. We also show that the probability of getting these
accurate arrival time predictions with a
model with a standard deviation exceeding 2 hours is less than 0.1%,
indicating that the excellent results cannot
be due to random chance, and the Richardson extrapolation has indeed
improved the original model by
J. Schmidt and Cairns (2019). This unprecedented accuracy is about 40
times better than the current state-of-the-art prediction of CME arrival
times with an average error of about +-10 hours.
The new model uses information available within a few hours after the
CME eruption and it can run much faster than real-time on a couple of
CPU cores. Based on the result, we recommend the new model to be
transitioned to operations as soon as possible to better protect our
space-born and ground-based assets from the harmful effects of space
weather.