Scientists are building a “state-of-the-art” digital space model around Earth to improve prediction of solar storms and their impacts on infrastructure.
Almost seventy years into the space age, scientists’ understanding space weather still very rude. Unlike terrestrial weather conditions, which are now predicted with great accuracy and timeliness by powerful supercomputers, space weather forecasts are more random.
Most of the time, an inaccurate space weather forecast means someone is high up. dawn-Viewing expectations are not met. But humanity is increasingly dependent on technologies that are vulnerable to the vagaries of space weather. Short radio interruptions GPS Space weather can wreak havoc on our daily lives due to blackouts and long-term power outages; perhaps not as frequent as downpours and storms, but of similar intensity.
A new model developed by a team of researchers led by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) is a step toward closing the gap between space and Earth weather forecasts. But scientists acknowledge that space weather forecasts may take decades to fully catch up.
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“We cannot predict space weather without first deeply understanding its physics,” Slava Merkin, a space physicist at APL and director of the Center for Geospace Storms (CGS), told Space.com. “We build the model and we do science with the model, and through that we explore the physics of geospace storms.”
Geospace is a term scientists use to describe the region around our planet. Soilupper atmosphere and surrounding space. Merkin said that with the new model, called Multiscale Atmospheric-Geospace Environment (MAGE), researchers want to capture processes occurring in geographic areas up to 1.2 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Earth. This is a vast region that extends four times farther from the planet. moon. But Earth’s influence on the universe goes further. The outermost edge of Earth’s magnetosphere, the magnetotail, can be viewed in the direction away from Earth, approximately 6.5 million km from Earth. Sun.
It is produced by the movement of molten metals inside. core of earthmagnetosphere interacts with explosions solar wind – streams of charged particles constantly emitted from the sun. This interaction produces the space weather phenomena we experience on Earth. Merkin said the process is extremely complex. It involves poorly understood physical interactions that occur in the thermosphere (the second highest level). earth atmosphere) and the ionosphere (an overlapping region containing high concentrations of charged particles created in the interaction with ultraviolet light from the sun).
“Our number one challenge is to address this system holistically,” Merkin said. “But the problem is that each of these fields is governed by different physics. They are populated by different populations of plasma and different gas particles, and they all engage in very complex interactions, especially during geomagnetic storms“
The team believes that their newly emerging model Bead-like structures in Aurora These sometimes appear over Earth’s polar regions ahead of major geomagnetic storms. The MAGE model revealed that these polar light pearls arise when magnetic lines in the distant magnetotail extend farther from the planet before geomagnetic storms, and then bubbles of light plasma are ejected toward Earth.
But the discovery also aptly highlighted the difficulty of predicting space weather. Like the proverbial wave of a butterfly’s wing, a physical process in a distant region of geographic space can produce visible and measurable effects near the Earth’s surface.
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“The computer model we have developed needs to be able to capture processes occurring at both very large scales and very small scales,” Merkin said. “At the same time, it needs to capture all the different physics problems and understand how the various areas (lower and middle atmosphere, ionosphere and magnetosphere) affect each other.”
Unlike terrestrial weather forecast models that summarize millions of measurements taken daily by hundreds of thousands of weather stations, aircraft and high-altitude balloons around the world, MAGE has to make do with far fewer data points.
“At any given moment in time, we actually have quite a few spacecraft in this enormous region,” Merkin said. “Point-to-point measurements can be very accurate, especially with new spacecraft, but we don’t have the scope to really know what’s going on at the system level.”
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Merkin and his colleagues have access to data accumulated since the beginning of the space age. Still, there are large gaps. For example, the lower layer of the thermosphere, located at altitudes between 60 and 120 miles (100 and 200 km), sometimes called the “”.ignorant sphereThe ignorant sphere, too high for stratospheric balloons to reach but too low for satellites to explore, is where auroras occur. MAGE can fill some of these gaps by leveraging powerful supercomputing and detailed measurements taken by satellites. satellites Higher in the atmosphere, along with information from radars and other sensors on the ground.
“As we move forward, the model becomes more and more complex,” Merkin said. “We’re adding more and more physics to this. The final product will represent geospace in its ultimate complexity.”
Merkin acknowledges that it may take decades for researchers to get there. Modeling space weather is an extremely complex task. The MAGE collaboration includes APL, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of New Hampshire, Rice University, Virginia Tech, UCLA, and Syntek, as well as dozens of software engineers, computer scientists, physicists, and other experts at research laboratories across the United States. Technologies contribute to this effort.