  Alerts of potentially hazardous coronal mass ejections (CME) are based on the
detection of rapid changes in remote observations of the solar atmosphere. This
paper presents a method that detects and estimates the central coordinates of
CME eruptions in Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) data, with the dual aim of providing
an early alert, and giving an initial estimate of the CME direction of
propagation to a CME geometrical model. In particular, we plan to link the
ALMANAC method to the CME detection and characterisation module of the Space
Weather Empirical Ensemble Package (SWEEP), which is a fully automated modular
software package for operational space weather capability currently being
developed for the UK Meteorological Office. In this work, ALMANAC is applied to
observations by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) aboard the Solar
Dynamics Observatory (SDO). As well as presenting the method, a proof of
concept test is made on a limited set of data associated with twenty halo CMEs
recorded by the Coordinated Data Analysis Workshop (CDAW) catalogue near the
activity maximum of solar cycle 24. SDO/AIA data for each event is processed at
6 minute cadence to identify the on-disk location and time of each CME. The
absolute mean deviance between the ALMANAC and CDAW source event coordinates
are within 37.05 +- 29.71 minutes and 11.01 +- 10.39 degrees. These promising
results give a solid foundation for future work, and will provide initial
constraints to an automated CME alert and forecasting system.
