Forecasting the Ionosphere at High Latitudes

Abstract:

One of the most challenging fundamental research problems is that of predicting the future state of a complex, highly nonlinear system that responds to external and internal drivers and exhibits emergent behavior (such as ionization patches, sporadic E, ionospheric bubbles, spread-F, the forms in the auroral oval, storms and substorms, etc.)

Traditionally these problems are addressed by:

• A climatology that estimates a likelihood in a manner too simplistic for decision making
• A first principles model that solves moments of the Boltzmann equation in some form and is typically used to replicate past observations.
• An assimilative model which is tuned to reproduce the type of data assimilative e.g. total electron content (TEC) in the form of a larger scale picture of current conditions.

Some of the challenges will be described. These include:

• representing forcing from below
• representing magnetospheric forcing
• provide a fully integrated self-consistent description of the high latitude electrodynamics through assimilation and a coupled magnetosphere-ionosphere-thermosphere (M-I-T) environment
• connecting the data that we have to the output of models to validate and assess
• correcting a model solution trajectory using real time, near real time and historical data to drive a particle filter prediction of the future state of the system
• supporting real users with meaningful forecasts

The talk will describe some of the tools we have to address these issues (including, of course, how we image the ionosphere in the UV) and how we might approach developing a community focused approach to addressing the broader challenges as we must do in order to make real progress.