The Solar Storms and Terrestrial Impacts Center (SOLSTICE) is a collaborative research center, leveraging multidisciplinary research techniques to further our modern understanding of space weather. SOLSTICE aims to combine machine learning technology, numerical models, and data from space missions to make advances in space physics understanding and space weather capabilities. I am the Co-PI of SOLSTICE leading the terrestrial impact tasks. Our research aims to resolve the sequence of events from solar wind driving magnetospheric disturbances to the consequent ground and ionospheric space weather effects.
We develop integrated physics-based magnetospheric and ionospheric simulations to improve forecast capability of propagation of SEPs in geospace, the ionospheric density, and the magnetic disturbances on ground. The interplanetary disturbances drive a complex set of multi-scale (large, meso, and kinetic) processes coupling the magnetosphere, ionosphere and thermosphere (M-I-T). Their space weather impacts in the near-Earth space as well as on ground depend on the details of these processes. The multi-scale magnetospheric processes (such as global convection and local re-connection) are tightly coupled to ionospheric dynamics controlling two key space weather threats, the ionospheric disturbances often measured by the total electron content (TEC) and the geomagnetically induced currents (GIC) arising from ground magnetic perturbations. The increasingly technological society needs spatially resolved and accurate advanced warnings of enhanced GIC harming the power systems and ionospheric disturbances disturbing the communication and navigation signals.
