Space Weather Prediction
Space weather refers to set of phenomena taking place anywhere from our upper atmosphere and into interplanetary space, and that impacts numerous facets of everyday life. Manifestations of space weather can have deleterious effects on engineering infrastructure, such as power grids, satellites, navigation systems, avionics, air travel, telecommunications and more. Therefore, the ability to understand and predict it is of paramount importance to protecting the technological infrastructure our society is dependent upon.
Prof. Ilie’s research addresses this need for predictive capabilities by developing and improving high-performance, multi-physics, and large-scale computational models that describe and predict the conditions in the near-Earth space. Her work is focused on studying the dynamics of plasmas and electromagnetic fields in these regions by combining numerical models with space-borne and ground-based measurements, which are used to validate and improve the models, but also to inspire further developments and discovery.
The models used and created by Prof. Ilie’s group contribute to a community-wide effort to improve space weather predictive capabilities, and are available to use by the scientific community, NASA, the Air Force, and other stakeholders, through various platforms, and have been showcased and used in numerous publications.
These include drift kinetic physics codes that simulate the plasma flow in the low latitude Earth’s inner magnetosphere (from approximately 10,000km to 50,000km altitude), a polar wind outflow model that simulates gyrotropic plasma transport along magnetic field lines in the Earth high latitude ionosphere (from 200km to 10,000km altitude), to three-dimensional global magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) magnetospheric modeling that simulate the plasma transport in the entire terrestrial environment. These models can be self-consistently coupled with each other, and to solar wind inputs, and thus provide a framework for understanding how our complex space environment is affected by, and responds to changes in the solar wind striking it.
These predictions are complemented and augmented by data analysis and interpretation from NASA missions such as TWINS, Cluster, THEMIS, Van Allen Probes, NOAA mission series such as POES and GOES, and defense/security satellites such as DMSP and the LANL geosynchronous constellation.
Comparing model output to spacecraft data is crucial to performing model validation and verification to achieve greater accuracy and confidence in model predictions. This multi-disciplinary approach provides critical insight and drives advances in predictive capabilities of the complex dynamics occurring in the solar wind-magnetosphere-ionosphere system.