Impact of SWFO Coronal Imagery and Solar Wind Measurements on Heliospheric and Geospace Models

The Space Weather Follow-On (SWFO) program will provide operational solar-coronal images and in situ solar wind measurements to space weather information users including the space science community. Here we review the impact of these data on the performance of heliospheric and geospace models.

Imagery from Compact Coronagraphs (CCOR) -1 and -2 will be processed by models such as SWPC’s CME Analysis Tool (CAT) to identify coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and estimate their parameters such as velocity in the plane of the sky, width, mass, etc. The parameters are used in updating the inner boundary conditions of inner-heliospheric models such as Enlil and EUHFORIA with numerous operational and research applications from propagation of CMEs, shocks, and other structures to SEP transport and acceleration. We will highlight recent advances enabled by such models. Other use cases of coronal data include several kinematic and statistical models.

In situ measurements of the plasma (by the Solar Wind Plasma Sensor, or SWiPS) and the IMF (by the magnetometer suite, or MAG) at Lagrange 1 (L1) will be used as drivers of geospace models. This is a broad category including global-magnetospheric fluid or hybrid simulations; regional models for the magnetosheath, radiation belts, ring current, and waves; low-order magnetospheric models such as WINDMI; empirical models for the magnetopause standoff distance, field and particle-flux models at geostationary orbit, etc. The same data will be used to drive ionospheric models ranging from empirical models such as OVATION and the Weimer models to large-scale simulations such as TIEGCM.

Finally, maintaining a high accuracy of these models is a key objective. For several of the geospace models, we will discuss uncertainty quantification and error propagation given the state of the solar wind at L1 with examples of simulations based on well-known magnetic storm intervals.