Position-Dependent Space Weather Hazards of Societal Significance in the Earth-Ionosphere Waveguide

Jamesina Simpson, University of Utah

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Jamesina Simpson, Alireza Samimi, Bach Nguyen, Sean Burns, Miguel Rodriguez, Santosh Pokhrel, Peter Swanson, wenyuan zhu, Victor Taylor

The goal of the proposed research is to greatly improve our ability to understand and predict space weather hazards to (1) electric power grids; and (2) electromagnetic wave propagation in the Earth-ionosphere waveguide up to ~20 kHz. The methodology of the proposed work is to advance and apply detailed, high-resolution Maxwell's equations models of the Earth-ionosphere waveguide developed by the project over the past decade. The project's three-dimensional (3-D) models uniquely include such details as the Earth's complete topography, oceans, lithosphere composition, geomagnetic field, and ionospheric plasma.

The proposed research study is unique as existing analytical formulations or computational approaches applied to the investigated topics above do not solve the complete Maxwell's equations while also accounting for all of the 3-D geometrical details and time variability as permitted by the project's models.

A 2008 National Academies report indicates that extreme space weather events, "though rare, are likely to occur again some time in the future." However, a re-occurrence of an 1859-magnitude CME-driven geomagnetic storm could disrupt today's human society to a much greater degree than in 1859 due to the proliferation of vital but vulnerable electro-technologies. The first goal of the proposed modeling is to help individual power grid stations understand their specific vulnerability to space weather. The second goal of the proposed modeling is to help improve our understanding of electromagnetic propagation in the Earth-ionosphere waveguide under disturbed conditions. Applications that may benefit from this work include: remote sensing of the lower ionosphere, hypothesized electromagnetic earthquake precursors, propagation from lightning, geolocation, communications, and even global temperature change.