Solar energetic particle events: Phenomenology and prediction

Solar energetic particle events can cause major disruptions to the operation of spacecraft in earth orbit and outside the earth's magnetosphere and have to be considered for EVA and other manned activities. They may also have an effect on radiation doses received by the crew flying in high altitude aircraft over the polar regions. The occurrence of these events has been assumed to be random, but there would appear to be some solar cycle dependency with a higher annual fluence occuring during a 7 year period, 2 years before and 4 years after the year of solar maximum. Little has been done to try to predict these events in real-time with nearly all of the work concentrating on statistical modelling. Currently our understanding of the causes of these events is not good. But what are the prospects for prediction? Can artificial intelligence techniques be used to predict them in the absence of a more complete understanding of the physics involved? The paper examines the phenomenology of the events, briefly reviews the results of neural network prediction techniques and discusses the conjecture that the underlying physical processes might be related to self-organised criticality and turblent MHD flows.