Center for Geospace Storms: Transforming the Understanding and Predictability of Space Weather

One of the grand challenges of Heliophysics today is understanding and ultimately predicting the dynamics of stormtime geospace – the near-Earth space environment spanning altitudes from a few tens to millions of kilometers. Geospace is a system of systems comprised of interconnected physical domains: the magnetosphere, including all of its regions; the ionosphere; and the upper atmosphere in which the ionosphere is embedded. The different domains of geospace are populated by neutral gases and plasmas that are immersed in electromagnetic fields and evolve on disparate temporal and spatial scales. During geomagnetic storms, all of these domains become active and engage in complex, non-linear, cross-scale interactions that profoundly alter the entire system. Untangling this web of causal connections in stormtime geospace in all its complexity is imperative if we are to predict space weather and its most severe impacts on our technological infrastructure.

In this talk, we present the NASA DRIVE Science Center for Geospace Storms (CGS), a recently selected NASA research and innovation hub, whose vision is to transform the understanding and predictability of space weather. One of the CGS objectives is to develop a Multiscale Atmosphere-Geospace Environment (MAGE) model with the above challenges in mind. MAGE simulates the physical processes responsible for all key space weather hazards, including geomagnetically induced currents, atmospheric drag, near-Earth radiation and communications and navigation disruption. We will briefly review MAGE simulations relevant to these hazards and discuss both opportunities and challenges on the path toward a more realistic representation of space weather phenomena in our physics-based models.