INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTIONBoosting Efforts to Predict Harmful Solar Weather Events

Published 10 May 2022

When big blasts of energy from the sun envelop the Earth, they can very strong: a 2015 event so weakened Earth’s protective magnetic field that it penetrated to the atmosphere, posing a threat to everything from circling space station astronauts to delicate electronics and communication systems.

When big blasts of energy from the sun envelop the Earth, they can be so strong that a 2015 event so weakened Earth’s protective magnetic field that it penetrated to the atmosphere, posing a threat to everything from circling space station astronauts to delicate electronics and communication systems.

They’re called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and in 1989 they caused a nine-hour, systemwide electrical blackout in Canada, resulting in the loss of some 19,400 milliwatts in Quebec. A similar event today could lead to a multi-million-dollar economic loss. That’s why space scientists have been working to develop accurate space weather forecasting models to predict and track CME storms.

Now, a professor of space science at The University of Alabama in Huntsville(UAH) has received a four-year, $2.301 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a comprehensive scientific model to understand and predict how CMEs influence the energetic particle radiation environment in the inner solar system and Earth’s magnetosphere, and compare those results with measurements at the Earth’s surface.

The grant supports a multidisciplinary team including UAH, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, and the National Solar Observatory.

The effort is expected to supply scientists with a new open-source tool that will forecast space weather, says principal investigator (PI) Dr. Gang Li, who is also a researcher at the Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR) at UAH, a part of the University of Alabama System.

“Two widely-used models, the Space Weather Modeling Framework (SWMF) and the improved Particle Acceleration and Transport in the Heliosphere model (iPATH), will be coupled,” says Dr. Li.

“Existing gaps in SWMF and iPATH will be bridged by developing two new models – a machine learning-assisted CME model for the lower solar corona, and a particle tracing model for transport from the Lagrange L1 point into the magnetosphere,” he says.

Co-PI Dr. Ying Zou, an assistant professor of space science at UAH and CSPAR researcher, will play a major role in helping researchers understand how energetic particles in the solar wind penetrate into the Earth’s magnetosphere and further precipitate down to the Earth’s surface, as well as developing a graduate level course on magnetospheric physics.