  In recent years, ensemble modeling has been widely employed in space weather
to estimate uncertainties in forecasts. We here focus on the ensemble modeling
of CME arrival times and arrival velocities using a drag-based model, which is
well-suited for this purpose due to its simplicity and low computational cost.
Although ensemble techniques have previously been applied to the drag-based
model, it is still not clear how to best determine distributions for its input
parameters, namely the drag parameter and the solar wind speed. The aim of this
work is to evaluate statistical distributions for these model parameters
starting from a list of past CME-ICME events. We employ LASCO coronagraph
observations to measure initial CME position and speed, and in situ data to
associate them with an arrival date and arrival speed. For each event we ran a
statistical procedure to invert the model equations, producing parameters
distributions as output. Our results indicate that the distributions employed
in previous works were appropriately selected, even though they were based on
restricted samples and heuristic considerations. On the other hand, possible
refinements to the current method are also identified, such as the dependence
of the drag parameter distribution on the CME being accelerated or decelerated
by the solar wind, which deserve further investigation.
