Numerical simulations of solar energetic particle event timescales associated with ICMEs

Abstract

Recently, S. W. Kahler studied the timescales of solar energetic particle (SEP) events associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from analysis of spacecraft data. They obtained different timescales for SEP events, such as TO, the onset time from CME launch to SEP onset, TR, the rise time from onset to half the peak intensity (0.5Ip), and TD, the duration of the SEP intensity above 0.5Ip. In this work, we solve the transport equation for SEPs considering interplanetary coronal mass ejection (ICME) shocks as energetic particle sources. With our modeling assumptions, our simulations show similar results to Kahler's analysis of spacecraft data, that the weighted average of TD increases with both CME speed and width. Moreover, from our simulation results, we suggest TD is directly dependent on CME speed, but not dependent on CME width, which were not found in the analysis of observational data.