Space Weather Priming: the missing link in prediction

The hazardous nature of space weather storms impacts technological systems in both space and on the ground. The UK is currently establishing operational models for space weather prediction though the Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre, but there are major challenges in predicting impacts, and understanding how the near space environment and atmosphere responds to space weather driving. For example, two similar space weather storms can have very different impacts on the heating of the upper atmosphere with implications for atmospheric drag on satellites and debris. 

A likely culprit for these differences is the priming of the system from previous space weather activity. Changes in the underlying magnetic configuration and plasma environment can result in very different impacts, on top of the seasonal effects imparted by the neutral atmosphere.  

This project will use the international EISCAT radars and the global SuperDARN radar network, facilities that have led the study of ionospheric phenomenon for decades.  These provide a considerable archive of important ionospheric parameters (e.g. the ionospheric electric field and conductance), which will facilitate statistical analysis of the response of the ionosphere to space weather.  

You will:  

• Identify the distributions of the data for different levels of space weather and analyse how they change when the recent history of space weather activity is considered  

• Determine how much the preceding values can be used to predict the future, with or without considering the driving 

• Build simple models for prediction and validate against new data, and compare with existing model outputs.