This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project will improve our ability to predict the access of solar energetic protons to Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere. Solar energetic particle (SEP) events have strong space weather impacts and can change the radiation environment in the radiation belts and can modify the ionosphere. The project will make use of state-of-the-art empirical models of Earth's magnetic field as well as physics-based models of the coupled ionosphere and magnetosphere. The project will compare the different models with ground-based observations to determine the errors incurred by the various assumptions made by the different models. The project will involve research done by undergraduate students.
