Speaker
Description
High-energy solar particles entering the Earth’s atmosphere can significantly increase radiation exposure at flight altitudes, especially during Ground Level Enhancement (GLE) events. The aim of this work is to investigate aviation radiation exposure during the GLE#76 event on 21 November 2024, with a focus on estimating effective dose at aviation altitude. During the calculations, the background contribution of galactic cosmic rays (GCR) and the excess component of solar energetic particles (SEP) associated with the event were treated separately, and the total dose rate was then determined from their sum. The model was based on effective dose yield functions for protons and alpha particles, while the integration of the energy spectra was performed using the log-log method over the range corresponding to flight altitudes. As a first step of the validation, we reconstructed the GCR background dose. We then investigated the additional radiation exposure during the event by adding the GLE#76 SEP component at different altitudes and geomagnetic cutoff rigidities. The results show that the total effective dose rate during GLE#76 in the aviation altitude range could have significantly exceeded the quiet GCR background level, especially at high altitudes and in regions with low cutoff rigidity. Among the investigated flight altitudes, the highest total effective dose rate was obtained at the highest considered altitude, 50 kft, in a polar region, where it reached 16 μSv/h, while the corresponding background GCR component was about 10 μSv/h. In addition, we also computed the event integrated dose, which allows one to estimate the received exposure to radiation under different scenarios, that is, flight routes. The presented method is suitable for rapid estimation of aviation radiation exposure during solar energetic particle events and may contribute to an accurate assessment of the aviation risk associated with space weather events.