Extreme Space Weather Events of the Past 30 Years: Preparation for Data From Mission Vigil

Abstract

Extreme Space Weather events can negatively affect ground-based infrastructure and satellite communications. European Space Agency plans to launch a new operational mission, Vigil, to monitor space weather activity and provide timely warnings about immediate danger. In this work, we have identified 24 instruments that have already acquired data on 8 space missions and are similar to instruments planned for mission Vigil. We then selected the 39 most extreme space weather events that affected the Earth in the past 30 years and gathered Vigil-like data for them. The objective of this work and our main motivation was to address the following question: “How would Vigil have observed extreme space weather events if it had been operational during those events?” For this reason, we prepared a pipeline for the community to obtain images and in-situ measurements for these specific periods, allowing straightforward applications for the follow-up data-driven studies. This effort could maximize Vigil's potential. Additionally, we studied the sources of extreme space weather events and the time it took for solar plasma to reach Earth's magnetosphere. This analysis demonstrates the utilization of the gathered data set and provides interesting insights into the most hazardous space events that influenced society in recent decades.