This award will establish a Center for Integrated Space Weather Modeling (CISM). The overall goal of CISM is to develop advanced computer models to specify and predict space weather from the surface of the sun to the surface of Earth. "Space Weather" is a term rapidly entering the common lexicon. It describes the ways in which the Sun, acting through the intervening space encompassing the solar wind, the magnetosphere, and the upper atmosphere, adversely affects the performance and reliability of space borne and ground based technological systems, or can endanger human life or health. CISM will focus on building a comprehensive, physics-based, numerical model that describes the environment from the Sun to the Earth, and can predict arrival time, intensity and duration of space storms. The Center will achieve three complementary goals: 1) it will do fundamentally new science, increasing our understanding of the complex, but closely coupled Sun-Earth system; 2) in partnership with other groups, it will convert the results of its research into robust and operationally useful forecasting tools to be used by both civilian and military space weather forecasters; and 3) it will educate the next generation of space scientists - taking advantage of the ability of space weather to capture imaginations through models and visualization tools. The principal knowledge transfer goal of CISM is to convert research results and models into robust operationally useful forecasting tools to be used by space weather forecasters and private industry. The most important legacy of the center will be improvements in the ability to respond to potential space weather hazards, thus protecting the nation's technological systems that are increasingly susceptible to conditions in the space environment.
(CISM) was an NSF Science and Technology Center led by Boston University that was funded from August 2002 – July 2013. It focused its activities around one of the core requirements of the National Space Weather Program, developing space weather modeling capabilities. "Space weather refers to conditions on the sun and in the solar wind, magnetosphere, ionosphere, and thermosphere that can influence the performance and reliability of space-borne and ground-based technological systems and can endanger human life or health," (National Space Weather Program Strategic Plan, 1995). Space weather can cause satellites to fail, disrupt radio communications, cause navigation errors, overload electrical power distribution systems, and expose astronauts to dangerous levels of radiation. Mitigating these effects requires both a better understanding of the space environment and the ability to predict and forecast conditions in space. CISM developed a suite of continually-improving comprehensive, physics-based simulation models that describe the space environment from the Sun to the Earth. The team tested and validated these models, the used them for research, made them available to the wider research community, helped transition them as appropriate for use as operational specification and forecasting tools, and used them as learning tools. This shared vision and task bound the geographically distributed and scientifically diverse CISM team into a tight center with everyone doing their part towards the common goal. A New Discipline When CISM was proposed and originally funded few scientists saw space weather research as a distinct discipline, or the Sun-Earth space weather system as a single coupled system to be studied as an integrated whole. Rather space physicists divided themselves into three rather distinct groups, solar and heliospheric physicists, magnetospheric physicists, and ionosphere/thermosphere physicists. CISM set out to change this. CISM championed the idea that we can only fully understand the space environment when we realize that it is a strongly coupled system, and embodied this idea in all we did. Over the past decade the idea that the Sun-Earth system is best considered as a single coupled system, or perhaps even a coupled system of systems, has begun to take hold amongst the community as a whole. One example of this change is seen in the structure of the latest NRC Decadal Report A Decadal Strategy for Solar and Space Physics that emphasizes coupling between regions, rather than having chapters on each region. While CISM certainly can’t take all the credit for this change, we think CISM played a significant part, most importantly through its education program teaching the next generation of scientists to think in this way. While extremely hard to quantify, this conceptual change could be CISM’s most important legacy. CISM Legacies CISM is leaving behind a number of important lasting legacies. The principal legacies that CISM leaves behind include: The development of a new interdisciplinary science that views the sun-earth system as a single closely coupled system. Twenty eight new PhD scientists who are well-trained space physicists from diverse backgrounds capable of using the tools of computational science to study the space environment and who approach problems from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. Over 300 graduates of the CISM Space Weather Summer School who have a broad overview of space weather, the science behind it, its effects, and how models can be used. The introduction of summer schools into our discipline and an ongoing Space Weather Summer school with a well established, respected curriculum much of which is published. A new graduate program in space science at a historically black university. A comprehensive suite of coupled models that simulate the space weather system from the Sun to the Earth and that will continue to be further developed. The introduction of community models and their systematic validation into space physics, encouraging the broader use of numerical models as research tools by the broader research community. Advances in space science, particularly in our understanding of processes critical to the development of the global model as represented by almost 300 refereed and well-cited papers Advances in computer science brought about by our need to efficiently couple disparate numerical models and assimilate observational data. The first successful transition of a scientific numerical simulation model into space weather operations by NOAA/SWPC. New models and understanding of the space environment that will lead to improved specification and forecasts at the nation’s space weather operations centers. A suite of physics-based forecasting and specification tools. A better public understanding of the Sun and its affect on the Earth’s space environment.
