Execution Plan

2007ES000295-fig02
Figure 2
[7]  For the purposes of this effort the near-Earth space environment is defined to be that region of space where the Earth's magnetic field controls the flow of non-relativistic ions and electrons including the ionosphere, thermosphere, plasmasphere, and magnetosphere. However, since many near Earth plasma processes result from direct interaction between these processes and those occurring in the solar wind and on the sun, the coupled models must extend from the upper atmosphere to the sun. Figure 2 shows the dependencies and relations of the various layers.

[8]  The National Geophysical Data Center maintains the official archive of space environmental monitoring data from civilian and military sources in a system called the Space Physics Interactive Data Resource (SPIDR) [O'Loughlin, 1997]. NGDC employs SPIDR and works with the principal authors of key space weather models to produce a historically accurate record of the near Earth space environment. NGDC scientists, along with guest workers and colleagues, have pioneered direct assimilation of data into space weather models. Various models exist which describe the near-Earth space environment. Typically these models describe either the high altitude neutral atmosphere, concentrating on the chemistry of the different regions, or the electrodynamics of the regions. One such data-driven physical model is the Assimilative Mapping of Ionospheric Electrodynamics (AMIE) technique [Richmond, 1992]. AMIE is able to ingest many different data sets such as ground based magnetometer perturbations, incoherent scatter radar measurements of ion and electron drifts, densities, and temperatures, satellite measurements of precipitating particles and ion flows, and ultra-violet images of the aurora. Using these data, AMIE derives a specification of the high-latitude ionospheric electrodynamic state. This includes maps of the electric potential, the field aligned and horizontal currents, and ionospheric conductance's, and the amount of energy being deposited into the ionosphere from precipitating particles and ion/neutral coupling (i.e. Joule heating).

2007ES000295-fig03
Figure 3
[9]  Our work expands the AMIE model to act as an ingest system for historical geophysical databases and for use in retrospective analysis. We have driven the models described below with the output from the expanded AMIE assimilation system as seen in Figure 3.

[10]  One such model is the newly created global ionosphere thermosphere model (GITM) [Ridley et al., 2006] used to model the neutral and ion composition, temperature, and dynamics from 95-750 km altitude. GITM solves for:

[11]  This model is a product of the University of Michigan. Another model the Simple Inner Magnetospheric Model (SIMM) is basically the Magnetospheric Specification Model (MSM) with AMIE output driving the high-latitude electric field. This model is from University of Texas Austin. The final output of the suite is a complete and physically integrated look at the space-environment over a long time period. This product has never been created before.


RJES

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