PREDICTING SPACE WEATHER

Dr. Nikolai Pogorelov is the principal investigator for research to develop open-source solar atmosphere and inner heliosphere software models useful to predict space weather.

UAH leads $3.2 million solar software model effort to aid in space weather predictions

UAH leads a project to develop open-source solar atmosphere and inner heliosphere software models useful to predict space weather that was awarded $3.2 million over three years by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA.

“We will develop an innovative, publicly available software that would make it possible to perform space weather simulations starting from the sun’s photosphere and extending to Earth’s orbit,” says Dr. Nikolai Pogorelov, the project’s principal investigator and a distinguished professor in UAH’s Department of Space Science and the UAH Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR).

It is one of seven projects awarded. The team includes UAH, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (co-principal investigator Brian Van Straalen), Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC; co-principal investigator Charles N. Arge), Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC; co-principal investigator Ghee Fry), and two private companies, Predictive Science Inc. (co-principal investigator Jon Linker) and Space Systems Research Corp. (co-principal investigator Lisa Upton).

The fastest NASA and NSF supercomputers will be employed. Dr. Pogorelov is one 49 awardees nationwide to get NSF-approved 2020-2021 supercomputing time on Frontera, the fastest NSF supercomputer.

“This project is aimed to develop a new data-driven, time-dependent model of the solar corona and inner heliosphere to predict the solar wind’s properties at Earth’s orbit,” he says. structure, which will make it possible for its users to modify the individual components when new observational data sets become available from emerging space missions and our knowledge of the physical processes governing solar wind acceleration and propagation improves.”

In addition to the inner heliosphere model, the team will develop new solar surface transport and potential field models to describe the solar atmosphere. That work will be done at Predictive Science Inc. and Space Systems Research Corp.

“All our codes will be easily extensible for further development,” Dr. Pogorelov says.

“We expect that our software will serve the heliospheric and space weather research communities for many years.”

SPACE WEATHER SIMPLIFIED accurate modeling of the solar wind is a neces-

The effort focuses on the physical and computational aspects of software development but Structuring of the solar wind into fast and slow the team will use MSFC’s expertise to develop streams is the source of recurrent geomagnetic operational codes and add features to simplify activity, Dr. Pogorelov says. The largest geomagthe space weather community’s efforts to create netic storms are caused by solar coronal disturnew tools to improve space weather predictions. bances called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that

“The development of successful numerical wind. models and their application to space weather

Accurate space weather forecasting is important to a high-tech Earth, Dr. Pogorelov says.

“The solar wind emerging from the sun is the main driving mechanism of solar events, which may lead to geomagnetic storms that are the primary causes of space weather disturbances that affect the magnetic environment of Earth and may have hazardous effects on space-borne and ground-based technological systems, as well as human health,” he says. “For this reason, sary part of space weather forecasting.” propagate through and interact with the solar modeling strongly depends on the observa- “The connection of the interplanetary tional data used to run the codes,” says Dr. magnetic field to CME-related shocks Pogorelov. “The expertise of GSFC and MSFC in and impulsive solar flares determines data assimilation and analysis, and operational where solar energetic particles software design, will be of major importance for propagate,” he says. “Data-driven this project.” modeling of stream interactions in the background Dr. Pogorelov is the leading developer of “We expect that our solar wind and CMEs propagating the Multi-Scale Fluid- software will serve through it are Kinetic Simulation Suite the heliospheric necessary parts (MS-FLUKSS), which will be used as a basis of the new software. He will and space weather research communities of space weather forecasting.” coordinate the software for many years.” Currently, development. the National

Together with Dr. Pogorelov and a to-be-hired Atmospheric Administration postdoctoral researcher, CSPAR researchers and Space Weather Prediction co-investigators Dr. Tae Kim and Dr. Mehmet Center forecasts the state of the Yalim will supervise simulations in the inner ambient solar wind and the arrival heliosphere and perform quantitative evaluation time of CMEs using an empirically of the simulation results. driven solar wind model.

Oceanic and

“The new models will provide more accurate solutions and will all be scalable on massively parallel systems, including Graphics Processor Units,” he says.

“In addition to improving space weather predictions at Earth, our developed models and software will be data driven. They will be based on the observational data and shed light onto physical processes occurring on the sun and in interplanetary space.”