The joint paper McNish and Lincoln Solar-Activity Predictions: The Method and Its Performanceby scientists from the Skoltech Center for Digital Engineering and World Data Center SILSO, Royal Observatory of Belgium has been honoured by the journal Solar Physics as an "Editor's Choice".

The authors include researchers from the Space Weather Laboratory (Skoltech Center for Digital Engineering), the PhD student Jain Shantanu and Centre's director and Head of lab Tatiana Podladichikova. 

The work is devoted to verify the effectiveness of the McNish and Lincoln (ML) method of sunspot number forecasts provided in real-time by the World Data Center SILSO at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. The concept was introduced in 1949, and was one of the first attempts to produce a medium-term forecast of sunspot numbers up to 12 months ahead. In the paper, scientists used the method to check monthly forecasts for the last 190 years, from 1833 (cycles of 8) to 2023 (cycles of 25). They found that ML method predictions appear to be reliable in the time range up to 50 months and thus could be upgraded for the operational predictions, which is of high importance for many space weather applications.