Abstract
J. Schmidt and Cairns (2019) have recently claimed 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 stated that the accuracy gets
better with increased grid resolution. Here, we show that combining
their results with the Richardson extrapolation (Richardson and Gaunt,
1927), which is a standard technique in computational fluid dynamics,
could predict the CME arrival time with 0.2+-0.26 hours accuracy. The
CME arrival time errors of this model would 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
these results cannot be due to random chance. This unprecedented
accuracy is about 20 times better than the current state-of-the-art
prediction of CME arrival times with an average error of about +-10
hours. Based on our analysis there are only two possibilities: the
results shown by J. Schmidt and Cairns (2019) were not obtained from
reproducible numerical simulations, or their method combined by the
Richardson extrapolation is in fact providing CME arrival times with
half an hour accuracy. We believe that this latter interpretation is
very unlikely to hold true. We also discuss how the peer-review process
apparently failed to even question the validity of the results presented
by Schmidt and Cairns (2019).