Advanced Space Weather Modeling

Gabor Toth, University of Michigan

Usage Details

Ward Manchester, Gabor Toth, Valeriy Tenishev, Zhenguang Huang, Bartholomeus van der Holst, Yuxi Chen, Bo Peng, Hongyang Zhou, Yash Sarkango, Agnit Mukhopadhyay, Xiantong Wang

The project aims to achieve breakthrough advances in the understanding of space weather. Space weather involves the dynamical processes of the Sun-Earth system that affect human life and technology. The most destructive forms of space weather, ranging from electrical power disruptions to radiation hazards for astronauts, are due to major solar eruptions: fast coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and eruptive X-class flares. These destructive events originate with magnetic fields emerging from the solar interior, forming the active regions from where CMEs erupt into the heliosphere. Upon impacting the Earth, interplanetary CMEs impact the magnetosphere and produce geomagnetic storms. This process is controlled by the microphysics of magnetic reconnection. The project's goal is to answer the most salient questions of space weather: how the buildup of magnetic energy results in solar eruptions and how magnetic reconnection results in geomagnetic storms. Improving the predictive capabilities of space weather models will have major societal benefits. Moreover, there will be extensive student involvement in the project.

The project will use a sophisticated multi-scale model, the Space Weather Modeling Framework (SWMF) that can represent detailed small-scale physics in a global system. The SWMF contains more than a dozen different models that can simulate various physics domains of the Sun-Earth system starting from the solar convection zone coupled to the solar corona, the heliosphere, the global and inner magnetosphere, and the ionosphere and upper atmosphere of the Earth. The flux emergence and CME initiation simulations will be carried out with our high-resolution magnetohydrodynamic code BATS-R-US. The simulation domain extends from the convection zone into the corona. To model the reconnection process, the project will use the extended magnetohydrodynamics with embedded particle-in-cell (MHD-EPIC) method. MHD-EPIC uses the efficient MHD code for most of the global system.

The Geospace models of the SWMF will eventually be transferred to operation at the Space Weather Prediction Center of the National Weather Service. Also, the SWMF is publicly available to other researchers.