The Space Weather Operational Readiness Development (SWORD) Center – Improving Orbital Space Weather Forecasting Via Model Coupling and Data Assimilation

The Space Weather Operational Readiness Development (SWORD) Center is an international, multi-disciplinary, focal point where space weather researchers, operational forecasters, industry partners, and the space weather community will collaborate on transformative research to improve forecasts and nowcasts of the geospace and cis-lunar space environments. SWORD research will couple two operational models in use at the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC): the University of Michigan (UMich) Geospace model, part of the Space Weather Modeling Framework (SWMF), and the NOAA/University of Colorado (CU) Whole Atmosphere Model - Ionosphere Plasmasphere Electrodynamics (WAM-IPE) model, significantly improving thermospheric neutral density and ionospheric irregularity forecasting. In addition, SWORD will prototype new data assimilation systems based on the NOAA JEDI framework on the NCAR Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model – Extended (WACCM-X) research model and transition these systems to the operational WAM-IPE model. SWORD will explore advanced physics-informed machine learning and functional discovery methods to produce reduced-order surrogate models for computational efficiency as well as cloud-based model development and deployment systems to accelerate the transition to operations at NOAA. SWORD consists of research teams from CU Boulder, UMich Ann Arbor, the National Center for Atmospheric Research High Altitude Observatory, the University of Alaska, and the University of Iowa, in partnership with Amazon Web Services, SpaceX, LeoLabs, GeoOptics, and Muon Space. In addition to close coordination with NOAA/SWPC through the NOAA Technical Transition Representative (TTR), SWORD will leverage international partnerships with the UK Met Office Space Weather Operations Center and the South African Space Agency Space Weather Forecasting Office to expand the reach of NASA space weather research. SWORD public outreach and educational development efforts will be coordinated through the University of Alaska Space Weather UnderGround (SWUG) program.