This composite image shows a SOHO image of the Sun and an artistic impression of the Earth’s magnetosphere. Power outages, massive blackouts, widespread damage to the satellites that enable GPS and telecommunications – space plasma phenomena like coronal mass ejections cause geomagnetic storms that interact with Earth’s atmosphere and destroy the systems and technologies that make modern society possible. Photo credit: magnetosphere: NASA, the sun: ESA / NASA-SOHO
The National Science Foundation awards a proposal for modeling space weather.
On a moonless night on August 28, 1859, the sky began to bleed. The phenomenon behind the northern lights had become global: an aurora stretching glowing rainbow fingers across time zones and continents lit the night sky with a wavy background of purple. From New England to Australia, people stood on the streets and looked up with admiration, inspiration and fear as the night sky shimmered in technicolor. But the beautiful display came at a cost. The global telegraph system, which was responsible for almost all long-distance communications at the time, was widespread. Some telegraph operators have been electrocuted while sending and receiving messages. others saw sparks flying from cable poles. The telegraph transmission was stopped for days.
The aurora and subsequent damage was later attributed to a geomagnetic storm caused by a series of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that burst from the sun’s surface, raced across the solar system, destroying our atmosphere with solar magnetic energy and wreaking havoc on electricity, which supplied the telegraph system. Although we no longer rely on the global telegraph system to keep connected around the world, in today’s world it would still be disastrous to witness a geomagnetic storm of similar magnitude. Such a storm could result in global blackouts, massive network outages, and widespread damage to the satellites that enable GPS and telecommunications – not to mention the potential threat to human health from increased radiation. Unlike storms on Earth, it can be difficult to predict the arrival and intensity of solar storms. Without a better understanding of space weather, we might not see the next major solar storm until it’s too late.
Richard Linares, Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace (AeroAstro), to improve our ability to predict space weather like on weather earth WITHleads a multidisciplinary research team to develop software that can effectively cope with this challenge. With better models, we can use historical observational data to better predict the effects of space weather events such as CMEs, solar wind, and other space plasma Phenomena of how they interact with our atmosphere. As part of the “Space Weather with Quantified Uncertainties” (SWQU) program, a partnership between the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASAThe team received a $ 3 million grant for their Composable Next Generation Software Framework proposal.
“By bringing together experts from the fields of geospatial science, quantification of uncertainty, software development, management and sustainability, we hope to develop the next generation of software for modeling and forecasting space weather,” says Linares. “Improving weather forecasting in space is a national need, and we saw a unique opportunity at MIT to combine the expertise we have across campus to solve this problem.”
Linares’ MIT staff include Philip Erickson, associate director at MIT Haystack Observatory and leader of the Atmospheric and Earth Sciences group at Haystack; Jaime Peraire, the HN Slater Professor of Aerospace; Youssef Marzouk, professor of aerospace; Ngoc Cuong Nguyen, a researcher in AeroAstro; Alan Edelman, professor of applied mathematics; and Christopher Rackauckas, instructor in the Faculty of Mathematics. External collaborators include Aaron Ridley (University of Michigan) and Boris Kramer (University of California at San Diego). Together, the team will focus on closing this gap by creating a model-oriented composable software framework that can be used to incorporate a variety of observational data collected from around the world into a global model of the ionosphere / thermosphere system.
“MIT Haystack research programs focus on near-earth space conditions, and our NSF-sponsored online madrigal database provides the world’s largest repository of community ground-based data on space weather and its effects on the atmosphere using worldwide scientific observations. This vast amount of data includes ionospheric remote sensing total electron content (TEC) that spans almost continuously across the globe and is computed from networks of thousands of individual recipients in the global navigation satellite system community, ”says Erickson. “TEC data, when analyzed along with results from next-generation atmospheric and magnetospheric modeling systems, offer an important future innovation that will greatly improve human understanding of critically important space weather effects.”
The project aims to create a powerful, flexible software platform that uses state-of-the-art computing tools to collect and analyze huge amounts of observational data that can easily be shared and reproduced by researchers. The platform should work even if computer technology advances quickly and new researchers from new locations contribute to the project with new machines. With Julia, a high-performance programming language developed by Edelman at MIT, researchers around the world can customize the software for their own purposes to contribute their data without having to write the program from scratch.
“I am very excited that Julia, who has quickly become the language of scientific machine learning and is a great tool for collaborative software, can play a key role in space weather applications,” said Edelman.
According to Linares, the composable software framework will serve as the foundation that can be expanded and improved over time, expanding both the space weather forecasting capabilities and the space weather modeling community itself.
The MIT-led project was one of six projects selected for three-year scholarships under the SWQU program. Motivated by the National Space Weather Strategy and Action Plan of the White House and the National Strategic Computing Initiative, the aim of the SWQU program is to bring together teams from different scientific disciplines to carry out the latest statistical analysis and high-performance computing methods in the field of space weather modeling.
“An important goal of the SWQU program is to develop sustainable software with built-in capabilities to assess the probability and magnitude of spatial electromagnetic interference based on sparse observational data,” says Vyacheslav Lukin, NSF program director in the physics department. “We look forward to this multidisciplinary MIT-led team laying the groundwork for such a development to enable advances that will transform our future space weather forecasting skills.”
