Predicting interplanetary shock occurrence for solar cycle 25: Opportunities and challenges in space weather research

IP shocks correlate well with solar activity, being more numerous during times of high sunspot numbers. Earth-bound IP shocks cause many space weather effects that are promptly observed in geospace and on the ground.

Such effects can pose considerable threats to human assets in space and on the ground, including satellites in the upper atmosphere and power infrastructure. Thus, it is of great interest to the space weather community to (a) keep an accurate catalog of shocks observed near Earth, and (b) be able to forecast shock occurrence as a function of the solar cycle (SC). In this work, we use a supervised machine learning regression model to predict the number of shocks expected in SC25 using three previously published sunspot predictions for the same cycle.