Modeling of coronal mass ejections that caused particularly large geomagnetic storms using ENLIL heliosphere cone model

In our previous paper we reported the results of modeling of 14 selected well‐observed strong halo coronal mass ejection (CME) events using the WSA‐ENLIL cone model combination. Cone model input parameters were obtained from white light coronagraph images of the CME events using the analytical method developed by Xie et al. (2004). This work verified that coronagraph input gives reasonably good results for the CME arrival time prediction. In contrast to Taktakishvili et al. (2009), where we started the analysis by looking for clear CME signatures in the data and then proceeded to model the interplanetary consequences at 1 AU, in the present paper we start by generating a list of observed geomagnetic storm events and then work our way back to remote solar observations and carry out the corresponding CME modeling. The approach used in this study is addressing space weather forecasting and operational needs. We analyzed 36 particularly strong geomagnetic storms, then tried to associate them with particular CMEs using SOHO/LASCO catalogue, and finally modeled these CMEs using WSA‐ENLIL cone model. Recently, Pulkkinen et al. (2010) developed a novel method for automatic determination of cone model parameters. We employed both analytical and automatic methods to determine cone model input parameters. We examined the CME arrival times and magnitude of impact at 1 AU for both techniques. The results of the simulations are compared with the ACE satellite observations. This comparison demonstrated that WSA‐ENLIL model combination with coronagraph input gives reasonably good results for the CME arrival times for this set of “geoeffective” CME events as well.