Team Results

  • Reviews and discussions of the evidence for the significance of nitrate signatures in ice cores as proxies of solar energetic particle events led the team to conclude that nitrate concentrations are (at least as presently available) not useful to constrain the distribution of energies involved in solar energetic events. That finding was separately pursued and substantiated by a team led by Eric Wolff who collected the primary information on that in preparation of the first meeting of our ISSI team. In their words: ‘The Carrington Event of 1859 is considered to be among the largest space weather events of the last 150 years. We show that only one out of 14 well-resolved ice core records from Greenland and Antarctica has a nitrate spike dated to 1859. No sharp spikes are observed in the Antarctic cores studied here. In Greenland numerous spikes are observed in the 40 years surrounding 1859, but where other chemistry was measured, all large spikes have the unequivocal signal, including co-located spikes in ammonium, formate, black carbon and vanillic acid, of biomass burning plumes. It seems certain that most spikes in an earlier core, including that claimed for 1859, are also due to biomass burning plumes, and not to solar energetic particle (SEP) events. We conclude that an event as large as the Carrington Event did not leave an observable, widespread imprint in nitrate in polar ice. Nitrate spikes cannot be used to derive the statistics of SEPs.’
  • The primary findings of the team are summarized by Schrijver et al. (2012): ‘The most powerful explosions on the Sun – in the form of bright flares, intense storms of solar energetic particles (SEPs), and fast coronal mass ejections (CMEs) – drive the most severe space-weather storms. Proxy records of flare energies based on SEPs in principle may offer the longest time base to study infrequent large events. We conclude that one suggested proxy, nitrate concentrations in polar ice cores, does not map reliably to SEP events. Concentrations of select radionuclides measured in natural archives may prove useful in extending the time interval of direct observations up to ten millennia, but as their calibration to solar flare fluences depends on multiple poorly known properties and processes, these proxies cannot presently be used to help determine the flare energy frequency distribution. Being thus limited to the use of direct flare observations, we evaluate the probabilities of large-energy solar events by combining solar flare observations with an ensemble of stellar flare observations. We conclude that solar flare energies form a relatively smooth distribution from small events to large flares, while flares on magnetically active, young Sun-like stars have energies and frequencies markedly in excess of strong solar flares, even after an empirical scaling with the mean coronal activity level of these stars. In order to empirically quantify the frequency of uncommonly large solar flares extensive surveys of stars of near-solar age need to be obtained, such as is feasible with the Kepler satellite. Because the likelihood of flares larger than approximately X30 remains empirically unconstrained, we present indirect arguments, based on records of sunspots and on statistical arguments, that solar flares in the past four centuries have likely not substantially exceeded the level of the largest flares observed in the space era, and that there is at most about a 10% chance of a flare larger than about X30 in the next 30 years.’
  • The team’s discussions made it very clear that radionuclide data, rather than chemical tracers, of solar energetic events would be essential in setting upper bounds to the Sun’s most energetic events. This led ISSI team member Ilya Usoskin to pursue a reinterpretation of radionuclide data from lunar rocks brought to Earth in the Apollo era in a study by Kovaltsov and Usoskin. In their words: ‘We revisited assessments of the occurrence probability distribution of large events in solar energetic particles (SEP), based on measurements of cosmogenic radionuclides in lunar rocks. We present a combined cumulative occurrence probability distribution of SEP events based on three timescales: directly measured SEP fluences for the past 60 years; estimates based on the terrestrial cosmogenic radionuclides 10Be and 14C for the multi-millennial (Holocene) timescale; and cosmogenic radionuclides measured in lunar rocks on a timescale of up to 1 Myr. These three timescales yield a consistent distribution. The data suggest a strong roll-over of the occurrence probability, so that SEP events with a proton fluence with energy > 30 MeV greater than 1011 (protons cm-2 yr-1) are not expected on a Myr timescale.’