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Register a new userWhat Sustained Multi-Disciplinary Research Can Achieve: The Space Weather Modeling Framework
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MHD-based global space weather models have mostly been developed and maintained at academic institutions. While the free spirit approach of academia enables the rapid emergence and testing of new ideas and methods, the lack of long-term stability and support makes this arrangement very challenging. This paper describes a successful example of a university-based group, the Center of Space Environment Modeling (CSEM) at the University of Michigan, that developed and maintained the Space Weather Modeling Framework (SWMF) and its core element, the BATS-R-US extended MHD code. It took a quarter of a century to develop this capability and reach its present level of maturity that makes it suitable for research use by the space physics community through the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) as well as operational use by the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC).
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In the United States, scientific research in space weather is funded by several Government Agencies including the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA). For commercial purposes, space weather forecast is made by the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Observations come from the network of groundbased observatories funded via various sources, as well as from the instruments on spacecraft. Numerical models used in forecast are developed in the framework of individual research projects. Later, the most promising models are selected for additional testing at SWPC. In order to increase the application of models in research and education, NASA in collaboration with other agencies created Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC). In mid-1990, US scientific community presented compelling evidence for developing the National Program on Space Weather, and in 1995, such program has been formally created. In 2015, the National Council on Science and Technology issued two documents: the National Space Weather Strategy [1] and the Action Plan [2]. In the near future, these two documents will define the development of Space Weather research and forecasting activity in USA. Both documents emphasize the need for close international collaboration in area of space weather.
The Carrington storm (September 1/2, 1859) is one of the largest magnetic storms ever observed and it has caused global auroral displays in low-latitude areas, together with a series of multiple magnetic storms during August 28 and September 4, 1859. In this study, we revisit contemporary auroral observation records to extract information on their elevation angle, color, and direction to investigate this stormy interval in detail. We first examine their equatorward boundary of auroral emission with multiple colors based on descriptions of elevation angle and color. We find that their locations were 36.5 deg ILAT on August 28/29 and 32.7 deg ILAT on September 1/2, suggesting that trapped electrons moved to, at least, L~1.55 and L~1.41, respectively. The equatorward boundary of purely red emission was likely located at 30.8 deg ILAT on September 1/2. If purely red emission was a stable auroral red arc, it would suggest that trapped protons moved to, at least, L~1.36. This reconstruction with observed auroral emission regions provides conservative estimations of magnetic storm intensities. We compare the auroral records with magnetic observations. We confirm that multiple magnetic storms occurred during this stormy interval, and that the equatorward expansion of the auroral oval is consistent with the timing of magnetic disturbances. It is possible that the August 28/29 interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs) cleared out the interplanetary medium, making the ICMEs for the Carrington storm on September 1/2 more geoeffective.
Using information on geomagnetic activity, sunspot numbers and cosmogenic isotopes, supported by historic eclipse images and in conjunction with models, it has been possible to reconstruct annual means of solar wind speed and number density and heliospheric magnetic field (HMF) intensity since 1611, when telescopic observations of sunspots began. These models are developed and tuned using data recorded by near-Earth interplanetary spacecraft and by solar magnetograms over the past 53 years. In this paper, we use these reconstructions to quantify power input into the magnetosphere over the past 400 years. For each year, both the annual mean power input is computed and its distribution in daily means. This is possible because the distribution of daily values divided by the annual mean is shown to maintain the same lognormal form with a constant variance. This study is another important step towards the development of a physics-based, long-term climatology of space weather conditions.
Muon detectors and neutron monitors were recently installed at Syowa Station, in the Antarctic, to observe different types of secondary particles resulting from cosmic ray interactions simultaneously from the same location. Continuing observations will give new insight into the response of muon detectors to atmospheric and geomagnetic effects. Operation began in February, 2018 and the system has been stable with a duty-cycle exceeding 94%. Muon data shows a clear seasonal variation, which is expected from the atmospheric temperature effect. We verified successful operation by showing that the muon and neutron data are consistent with those from other locations by comparing intensity variations during a space weather event. We have established a web page to make real time data available with interactive graphics (http://polaris.nipr.ac.jp/~cosmicrays/).
The nonlinear evolution of collisionless plasmas is typically a multi-scale process where the energy is injected at large, fluid scales and dissipated at small, kinetic scales. Accurately modelling the global evolution requires to take into account the main micro-scale physical processes of interest. This is why comparison of different plasma models is today an imperative task aiming at understanding cross-scale processes in plasmas. We report here the first comparative study of the evolution of a magnetized shear flow, through a variety of different plasma models by using magnetohydrodynamic, Hall-MHD, two-fluid, hybrid kinetic and full kinetic codes. Kinetic relaxation effects are discussed to emphasize the need for kinetic equilibriums to study the dynamics of collisionless plasmas in non trivial configurations. Discrepancies between models are studied both in the linear and in the nonlinear regime of the magnetized Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, to highlight the effects of small scale processes on the nonlinear evolution of collisionless plasmas. We illustrate how the evolution of a magnetized shear flow depends on the relative orientation of the fluid vorticity with respect to the magnetic field direction during the linear evolution when kinetic effects are taken into account. Even if we found that small scale processes differ between the different models, we show that the feedback from small, kinetic scales to large, fluid scales is negligable in the nonlinear regime. This study show that the kinetic modeling validates the use of a fluid approach at large scales, which encourages the development and use of fluid codes to study the nonlinear evolution of magnetized fluid flows, even in the colisionless regime.
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