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The forecasting of solar energetic particles (SEPs) is a prominent area of space weather research. Numerous forecasting models exist that predict SEP event properties at proton energies 10MeV and >60MeV flux profiles within minutes of a flare being detected. This work describes SPARX-H, the extension of SPARX to forecast SEP events above 300MeV . SPARX-H predicts fluxes in three high energy channels up to several hundred MeV. Correlations between SEP peak flux and peak intensity of the associated solar flare are seen to be weak at high energies, but improved when events are grouped based on the field polarity during the event. Initial results from this new high energy forecasting tool are presented here and the applications of high energy forecasts are discussed. Additionally, the new high energy version of SPARX is tested on a set of historic SEP events. We see that SPARX-H performs best when predicting peak fluxes from events with source locations in well-connected regions, where many large SEP events tend to originate., Accepted for publication in Space Weather 13 pages, 5 figures

The key paradigm of digital rock physics (DRP) "image and compute" implies imaging and digitizing the pore space and mineral matrix of natural rock and then numerically simulating various physical processes in this digital object to obtain such macroscopic rock properties as permeability, electrical conductivity, and elastic moduli. The steps of this process include image acquisition, image processing (noise reduction, smoothing, and segmentation); setting up the numerical experiment (object size and resolution as well as the boundary conditions); and numerically solving the field equations. Finally, we need to interpret the solution thus obtained in terms of the desired macroscopic properties. For each of these DRP steps, there is more than one method and implementation. Our goal is to explore and record the variability of the computed effective properties as a function of using different tools and workflows. Such benchmarking is the topic of the two present companion papers. Here, in the first part, we introduce four 3D microstructures, a segmented Fontainebleau sandstone sample (porosity 0.147), a gray-scale Berea sample; a gray-scale Grosmont carbonate sample; and a numerically constructed pack of solid spheres (porosity 0.343). Segmentation of the gray-scale images by three independent teams reveals the uncertainty of this process: the segmented porosity range is between 0.184 and 0.209 for Berea and between 0.195 and 0.271 for the carbonate. The implications of the uncertainty associated with image segmentation are explored in a second paper.

This is the second and final part of our digital rock physics (DRP) benchmarking study. We use segmented 3-D images (one for Fontainebleau, three for Berea, three for a carbonate, and one for a sphere pack) to directly compute the absolute permeability, the electrical resistivity, and elastic moduli. The numerical methods tested include a finite-element solver (elastic moduli and electrical conductivity), two finite-difference solvers (elastic moduli and electrical conductivity), a Fourier-based Lippmann-Schwinger solver (elastic moduli), a lattice-Boltzmann solver (hydraulic permeability), and the explicit-jump method (hydraulic permeability and electrical conductivity). The set-ups for these numerical experiments, including the boundary conditions and the total model size, varied as well. The results thus produced vary from each other. For example, the highest computed permeability value may differ from the lowest one by a factor of 1.5. Nevertheless, all these result s fall within the ranges consistent with the relevant laboratory data. Our analysis provides the DRP community with a range of possible outcomes which can be expected depending on the solver and its setup.

COMESEP is a new European space weather alert system. It consists of several interconnected tools that work together to analyse data and automatically provide alerts for geomagnetic storms and SEP radiation storms. The system is triggered by different solar phenomena, such as CMEs, solar flares and coronal holes. After the automatic detection in solar data of any of these transients, the different modules of the system communicate in order to exchange information. For example, an automatic CME detection (by CACTus) triggers the drag‐based model of CME propagation in order to calculate arrival times to Earth. A database of model runs of a test particle SEP model is consulted to generate an SEP radiation forecast. Overall the system produces a series of coherent alerts that are then displayed online. In this talk the different tools and the general functioning of the system will be presented. This work has received funding from the European Commission FP7 Project COMESEP (263252).