Radiation will be a major hazard of living on the Moon, especially for anyone not behind protective shielding. The release of energy from solar flares has been difficult to forecast. Now four Japanese scientists with Nagoya University and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan have developed a model, based on observations of the sun from 2008 to 2018, for predicting large solar flares. In an article published in Science, they say that “in most cases” the model correctly identifies the region of the sun that will produce large flares within 20 hours and, within limits, how powerful it will be.
However, say the authors, the model does produce some false positives and false negatives. “Accurate predictions of solar flares could improve forecasts of space weather conditions around Earth,” they say. Presumably, those predictions apply to the Moon as well. Here is the abstract for the paper in Science.
Solar flares are highly energetic events in the Sun’s corona that affect Earth’s space weather. The mechanism that drives the onset of solar flares is unknown, hampering efforts to forecast them, which mostly rely on empirical methods. We present the κ-scheme, a physics-based model to predict large solar flares through a critical condition of magnetohydrodynamic instability, triggered by magnetic reconnection. Analysis of the largest (X-class) flares from 2008 to 2019 (during solar cycle 24) shows that the κ-scheme predicts most imminent large solar flares, with a small number of exceptions for confined flares. We conclude that magnetic twist flux density, close to a magnetic polarity inversion line on the solar surface, determines when and where solar flares may occur and how large they can be.