Geomagnetic storms and sudden changes of magnetospheric properties due to sudden changes in solar wind conditions affect a wide variety of systems on Earth and in orbit. For example, large geomagnetic storms can interrupt radio communications; increase pipeline and power grid currents and change high-altitude atmospheric drag affecting low-altitude satellite orbits. Interplanetary pressure events, like interplanetary shocks compressing the magnetosphere, lead to sudden impulses that can have a high enough rate of ground magnetic field change producing an adverse amount of current in technological systems. In developing an understanding how to accurately forecast the state of the Earth's magnetosphere, solar wind plasma and interplanetary magnetic field measurements serve as the primary input parameters to empirical and theoretical models. Currently models, predictions and general science take only single-spacecraft input from the solar wind even though it is known that the solar wind input can be highly asymmetrical and multiple solar wind monitors are often available.
Therefore, the authors propose to use data from all available solar wind monitors to reconstruct a more representative solar wind profile across the magnetospheric cross-section using modern, self-consistent magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) data assimilation techniques. Furthermore, they propose to compare predictions for real magnetospheric events based on the thus developed assimilated multi-point measurements and on the currently employed single-point upstream observations and quantify the improvements. The proposed assimilation technique will allow the development of better understanding of the Sun-Earth interactions based on a more complete description of the solar wind and more accurate space weather predictions. The results (both method and code will be made publicly available) will have the potential to improve the accuracy of space weather predictions, and also to assist the scientific community in solar wind-magnetosphere interaction studies, especially for the case of asymmetric solar wind/IMF input conditions.
An international and multi-institutional collaboration (NASA/GSFC, NOAA/SEC, and Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic) is planned for the proposed work.
