Modeling an Extreme Coronal Mass Ejection and its Consequences for the Earth’s Magnetosphere

Abstract:

Interplanetary coronal mass ejections (CMEs) can have a variety of different impacts upon Geospace. The most extreme CME on record to have struck the Earth is the well-known Carrington event of 1859. However, in the sixty or so years since the Space Age began, we have thus far been exceptionally lucky that no extreme CME has impacted the Earth’s space environment. The work by Tsurutani and Lakhina, GRL, 2014 estimates some of the potential impacts that an extreme CME could have on Geospace. Tsurutani and Lakhina, 2014 utilize empirical relations to provide best estimates of: (1) the magnetopause’s location, (2) the sudden impulse intensity, and (3) the magnetospheric electric field. The CME conditions described by Tsurutani and Lakhina, 2014 is the most extreme CME conceived by our current theoretical and empirical knowledge; such a CME is likely to be MORE extreme than the Carrington event. Global magnetospheric models are now capable of simulating such events to give insight into the effects of extreme space weather conditions.

This work will present the results of simulations with the Space Weather Modeling Framework using the global magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) Block Adaptive Tree Solar wind Roe-type Upwind Scheme (BATS-R-US) code. The simulation uses the exact extreme CME conditions presented in Tsurutani and Lakhina, 2014 to model the impact of an extreme CME on the magnetosphere. We will present the successful simulation of these extreme space weather conditions. We will directly compare and contrast the predicted values from the empirical relations presented in Tsurutani and Lakhina, 2017 with the results of the MHD simulations: the sudden impulse dB/dt, magnetopause location, and the magnetospheric electric field. We will discuss future endeavors with this simulation framework to explore the response of the magnetospheric system to extreme space weather events.