Space Weather with Quantified Uncertainties

Space weather phenomena such as coronal mass ejections, geomagnetic storms, and solar flares strongly affect the Earth’s atmosphere and could lead to massive network failures and damages to telecommunication and navigation systems. This work focuses on developing a model-focused composable software framework to leverage historical space weather observation data and better predict the impact of space weather phenomena on Earth’s atmosphere. One of the applications of this work is the prediction of the atmospheric density under the influence of space weather phenomena. The video below shows the evolution of the total atmospheric mass density modeled using a physics-based GITM model during high solar activity.

As this model requires high computational cost and time, our work aims to develop a framework with rapid and accurate forecasting capabilities. ARCLab is collaborating with MIT Haystack Observatory, MIT Department of Mathematics, University of Michigan and University of California at San Diego for this work.

Image: Joy Ng / ARMS / Goddard Space Flight Center / NASA