Speaker
Description
This study focuses on the Mother’s Day (or Gannon) geomagnetic storm of May 2024, which became the most intense space weather event of solar cycle 25. It reached a peak Kp value of 9 and was classified as a G5-level geomagnetic storm, marking it as one of the most extreme storms since 2003. During this period, multiple solar flares associated with SIDC Sunspot Group 75 (NOAA Active Region 13664) and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) were recorded. These events produced powerful solar energetic particles and interplanetary CMEs (ICMEs) that significantly impacted Earth. The storm’s prolonged duration had widespread effects, particularly on both space-based and ground-based systems. Notably, the event also gained significant media attention, which helped raise awareness about space weather’s societal impacts.
A central focus of our study is the demonstration of the ESA Space Weather (SWE) Portal’s capabilities in monitoring, analyzing, and documenting major space weather events. The ESA SWE Portal is an online platform that provides access to real-time and historical space weather data, monitoring tools, and forecasts to support research and operational analysis of solar, interplanetary, and geomagnetic events.
This work highlights how the portal captured the progression of the May 2024 storm, from early solar eruption predictions to real-time impact tracking, providing invaluable data for understanding the storm’s effects. In addition, this study offers a consolidated description of the event, summarizing the vast array of data available on the portal. It explores the timeline of the event in detail, connects different data sources, and enables a retrospective analysis of how the event was predicted by the network’s forecasts and models. This approach showcases the ESA SWE Portal’s effectiveness in providing essential data for accurate forecasting and informing mitigation strategies for future space weather events.
