NSF Award
0076419
ATM-0076419<br/>Vassiliadis<br/><br/>This collaborative proposal focuses on the creation and validation of a community based real-time and retrospective high-latitude ionospheric electrodynamics specification and forecasting tool. At it's core, the tool will have the assimilative mapping of ionospheric electrodynamics (AMIE) technique. The model will make predictions of the eletrodynamic state of the high-latitude ionosphere for up to 60 minutes ahead of time. In addition, the PIs will make the code available to the community through a simple graphical user interface which will allow community members to run AMIE for their campaigns.<br/><br/>The creation of the predictive model will give fundamental insight into many non-steady-state magnetospheric processes, such as substroms and storms by allowing a quantitative examination of how the state of the magnetosphere and ionosphere are dependent both on the current state and the external driving conditions.<br/><br/>The PI's will perform a quantitative validation of AMIE and rtAMIE. The validation will give average error estimates for each grid point on AMIE for the ionospheric potential and conductances. These error estimates will be functions of: (1) location, (2) data density, (3) activity level, and (4)season. This quantitative validation will allow users of the code to fully understand the accurarcy of the results. No other electric potential model has this capability, even though it is crucially important for studies of ionospheric and magnetospheric phenomena.
