Towards a 27 Day Prediction of Ionospheric and Thermospheric Space Weather

    In March of 2011, during my winter semester at Eastern Michigan University Department of Physics & Astronomy, I had the honor of writing a proposal for a research scholarship program award with my computational physics professor, Dr. Dave Pawlowski.  The proposal was for the University Research Stimulus Program (URSP) at EMU. The objective of this award was to facilitate research partnerships between undergraduate students and Eastern Michigan University faculty along with a reward of scholarship for the undergraduate.

  Shortly after submitting my proposal, I had received confirmation that I had in fact been granted the URSP award. During the months of April through August 2011, I had been working daily as an undergraduate research assistant under the direction of Dr. Pawlowski. This research was my first plunge into the discipline of computational physics. Over this time period I had gained experience in the subject and performed the following:

• Running computer simulations of Earth’s upper atmosphere based on observations of the sun. Creating a probabilistic forecast for space weather.
• Programmed software scripts using IDL and FORTRAN
• Completed NASA’s Information Security Training, granted access to NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer.
• Parallel computing protocol with Message Passing Interface (MPI)

This post is the contents of a research poster I had put together for a presentation I had made to three groups of visiting 7th and 8th graders, fellow science undergraduates and faculty. You may also download my poster in PDF format here.
 

Abstract

  The prospect of what we can do to increase the knowledge of space weather is promising. One of the practical reasons for doing so is the fact that perturbations in density and temperature in the upper atmosphere can have a significant effect on satellites and instrumentation in low orbit of Earth.  By utilizing ensembles of simulations or ensembles that are based on the uncertainty of the system drivers,  we can run computer simulations to help us make probabilistic forecasts about space weather. In this study, we prepared an ensemble simulation based on uncertainties in the solar extreme ultraviolet (EUV) flux. Then, using the Global Ionosphere-Thermosphere Model (GITM) we ran simulations simultaneously using these ensembles, and analyzed the results.

Introduction

•Space weather

•the conditions in Earth’s upper atmosphere (ionosphere and thermosphere) in response to changing conditions on the sun. 

Why do we scarcely hear meteorologists in our local news reports making predictions about space weather?  

•The overarching reasons:

•Society at large generally doesn’t know that space weather affects expensive infrastructure we use daily (e.g. satellite communications, GPS navigation)

•Space weather forecasting is currently in significant need of more scientific research in order to make reasonably accurate, long-term predictions.

•Ensemble forecasting

•Create a statistical sample of weather outcomes by performing multiple computer simulations simultaneously.

•Ensembles, are based on a number of input conditions called “system drivers”.

•Ensemble members are created based on the uncertainty of these drivers and are used as inputs to our Global Ionosphere and Thermosphere Model (GITM) and simulations are performed which will create a probabilistic forecast of space weather.

  This first segment of this long-term study involves understanding and collecting solar flux data. Utilizing the known uncertainties of this data, we created an ensemble of drivers that were used as input to multiple GITM simulations.  This study examines the effect of the uncertainty in the solar flux on the state of the upper atmosphere.

About the Global Ionosphere and Thermosphere Models

•3-D coupled thermosphere-ionosphere model [Ridley et al., 2006]

•Solves for 11 Neutral and 10 Ion species, neutral winds (horizontal and vertical), ion and electron velocities and neutral, ion, and electron temperatures

•Does not assume hydrostatic equilibrium: Coriolis, vertical ion drag, non- constant gravity, massive auroral zone heating

•Flexible grid resolution, fully parallel, with an altitude grid 

•Allows for 1D simulations to perform long duration

For this study: 2.5o Latitude x 5o Longitude resolution using 64 processors on the NASA Pleiades supercomputer

Drivers: Solar Flux

 

Plot of the Solar Flux vs. Time.  The black line represents the actual solar flux. The colored lines represent the 5 ensemble members that are used to drive the simulations.

Thermosphere Results

The following plots show the mean mass atmospheric density which is determined from the mean of 5 ensemble members  (top plots) and their standard deviations (bottom plots) of the thermosphere at a 403 km altitude.

 

1:00 UT: The simulation has just started and thus there is small  difference between the simulations due to the different solar fluxes being used.

4:00 UT: The effects of the flare on the mass density begin to appear.

6:00 UT: Here the effects of the flare reaches its maximum. On a large scale, this is when the largest effects occur. Notice the time delay in effects from Figure 1's peak.

13:00 UT: The effects of the uncertainty have propagated globally. High levels of standard deviation are probably due to significantly different wind patterns. The black arrow points to a maximum uncertainty of 1.7%

Ionosphere Results

The following plots show the mean electron density which is determined from the mean of the 5 ensemble members (top plots) and their standard deviations (bottom plots) of the ionosphere at an altitude of 118 km (left) and 403km (right) .

3:00 UT (118 km): Flare has just ended. Ionosphere is significantly uncertain on the day side.

3:00 UT (403 km): At this higher altitude our standard deviation has significantly increased along with the mean density of electrons.  

Conclusions and Future Work

    Given the uncertainties in the solar flux, it takes several hours for thermosphere to become uncertain. Within 12 hours, the uncertainties have propagated globally in the thermosphere. This is interesting because the thermosphere only affects the day side directly.

•At 13 UT the maximum uncertainty is 1.7%

The ionosphere, however can become uncertain very quickly.

•At 3:00 UT (403 km): The maximum uncertainty is 47%.

The ultimate goal of this research is to predict space weather over one solar rotation period (27 days). We need to study the uncertainty involved in using data on this month’s drivers to predict next month’s space weather. This research also has yet to account for both types of uncertainty in the driver: flare and daily uncertainty. In the future, it will use even more ensemble inputs, like interplanetary magnetic fields (IMF) and solar wind to the GITM model.

References and Acknowledgements

Ridley, A.J., Deng, Y., Toth, G., The Global Ionosphere-Thermosphere Model, J. Atmos. Sol-Terr. Phys., 68, 839, 2006

Flare irradiance data was processed and provided by Phil Chamberlin and Anne Wilson, University of Colorado. http://lasp.colorado.edu/lisird/fism/fism.html

Special thanks to Eastern Michigan University for proving the Undergraduate Research Stimulus Program.

The Persistent Cloud: Part I

The Persistent Cloud: Part I

by Andrew M. Samuels

Specialist Ethan Meyer walks outside his DRASH to take in the crisp clean air and head towards the mess for breakfast. The sun beams contently and focused. Nothing but clear skies if you ignore the lone cloud hovering in the distance moving towards Kandahar. Meyer occasionally did daily routines the old-fashioned way for nostalgia’s sake, he could have easily checked the weather on his Android mobile and synced it with his Packbot to bring him back some coffee. Admiring the generous weather, Ethan wished this was a vacation, but the resurgent Taliban seems to be attempting to put a damper on such fantasies.

Spc. Meyer’s squad set up their DRASH tent in about an hour as the rest of the company moved into the base set up just outside Kandahar.  NATO forces and the new Afghan military had Kandahar under control for several years until an uptick in violence had spiked as a result of the troop surge. Taliban forces retreated and regrouped to hold out in Kandahar.

It didn’t take a very extensive analysis to understand that the Taliban insurgency was planning. They’ve seen the efforts of the insurgency in Iraq and wished to inflict the same type of damage in an attempt to wear down NATO’s political will through brutal violence in an urban setting. The enemy will disguise themselves as civilians, hiding like cowards amongst the innocent. Scoffing at our efforts to root them out while the civilian populace is made to suffer by the insurgents as distractions and shields.

It has been a little more than a decade since the fall of Baghdad in 2003. People have said that the Second Gulf War was a hopeless effort that solved nothing. But Meyer knew better, and more so, the defense strategists, scientists, and engineers knew better. War had changed. It took a decade to find any measurable adaptation, but it came. A few suits at the top with scientific degrees and an itch for problem solving put in the order for billions of dollars worth of funds, not for new weaponry, but for innovative minds. And these minds literally decided to put their head up in the clouds.

The lone cloud parked itself high above the base. It looked so distant, yet looming. You knew it was thinking. When you looked up at it you wondered if your supposed reality was a tug-o-war between your own dream and the dream of the machine.  The brains at the Department of Defense research facilities dubbed it EPAC or Encrypted Persistent Airship Cloud.

When the public thinks of airships, they think of big burning crashing oh-the-humanity German zeppelins. If you rubbed your gym-socked feet against the carpet and touched the thing you would hear the “ka” and the “boom” walk hand in hand under the flames.

Airship design and engineering has evolved since your great grandma’s flapper days; in this case you didn’t have to worry about any souls lost on the ship because EPAC is unmanned. Controlled by some twenty-somethings in Nevada who had probably gotten their start in operating multi-million dollar aircraft on their Xbox 360. From the pictures Meyer had seen, they hardly had to leave their mom’s basement couch to operate EPAC. In fact, one of the pilots navigated the mechanical cloud with an Xbox controller.

Our parents tried to tell us those damn video games would get us nowhere. Now recruitment offices scouted new warfighters partly based on how many points a prospective recruit had racked up playing the Halo series on the Xbox Live network. Past gaming data starting at a time when it was still awkward to put your hands around the cute blond at the school dance. Courtesy of corporations that never disposed of years worth of data. And what was the need? Data storage was cheap. Cheaper than oil is these days. You could store mountains worth of data for peanuts.

The problem with all this data was never the storage.  Just because you had petabytes worth of data about your target demographic, it didn’t mean you knew what the hell to do with it or what the data even meant.  It wasn’t until the data was processed, organized, and interpreted that it actually became useful. Useful to a point where it separated your problems in real time before your eyes and placed them in cute little Tupperware containers for further inspection by the brains wearing boots.

This airship was built on imagination meeting application. It stood almost motionless, lofty, dreamy, it tried to fool you. At a high enough altitude where shooting projectiles at it with most conventional weapons would be pointless. Massive enough, where some will ogle at it, attempt to touch it like cats and yarn. EPAC housed an impressive array of sensors, communication devices, and parallel processing units inside its blank white hull. A supercomputer onboard that might convince you that it could learn. Maybe even think like you do.  But EPAC’s supercomputer doesn’t think like you do. It does better, but has a different purpose. By no means did it replace the need for the intelligence operative, it worked with her, synced with her. Defense engineers synced every piece of equipment with a sensor of some sort to the cloud. Drones, MRAPs, mobile phones, battlechips, packbots, even the cameras mounted on a soldier’s helmet; EPAC inhaled the torrent of sensor data served by the darknet, an encrypted network of information flow facilitated by the airship.

The influx of data from the Iraq War was like no other in history, and DoD jumped on the mountain and fielded its best and brightest to climb it, contemplate it, and build powerful clouds that could rain down bytes to consume the mountain.  No longer an obstacle, but an ally to the warfighter.  Well, at least that’s the idea.

EPAC is an idea. An idea conceived in the humility of those willing to learn from the past, and use technology to soak up the sea of knowledge that the past and present battlefield contains. Warfighters on the field weren’t quite ready for the torrential rain of information the persistent cloud would unleash. Specialist Ethan Meyer looks down at his blinking mobile phone, a reminder that the syncronization with EPAC would begin in fifteen minutes. Meyer thought he just heard thunder in the mostly cloudless sky.

Augmented Browsing with Ruby Programming Language + Watir Module

Some things on the world wide web cannot be automated easily. The PHP/cURL combination is typically the most convenient and controllable way of automating the web and mimicking a normal web user, but there are roadblocks and obstacles along the way that can prevent you from using that particular type of programming easily.

When I say obstacles, I mean when web developers use sophisticated Javascript or AJAX in their web pages. The cURL library doesn't like this very much, and it is a bit more difficult to read the HTTP protocols necessary to send back to the web server the website is hosted on. In comes augmented Browsing with Ruby/Watir!

What is Ruby?
Ruby is an object-oriented programming language with a bit more power than PHP (a scripting programming language), although arguably a different aim in intentions for web purposes. Ruby nevertheless is growing in popularity amongst web developers, but is still the minority compared to PHP.

What is Watir?
Watir is an automated web browsing testing toolkit. It uses a technique called augmented browsing that allows it to literally and visually drive the Internet Explorer browser on your desktop computer programmatically. Instead of simulating a browser, like cURL, Watir steers the actual browser on your computer with Ruby's built-in OLE and COM support.


Ruby + Watir = Using your internet browser with no hands
Because you are actually controlling a real browser like Internet Explorer, obstacles in websites like funky Javascript and flashy AJAX are much easier to tackle. The problem is augmented browsing with Ruby/Watir is slow as molasses in comparison to PHP/cURL.

FBPoster
This program automated Facebook and didn't have any practical application other than to see how Watir worked, and if I could do it. It could log into your Facebook account, use the search box to look for Facebook groups related to a keyword, then it would post a custom comment of your choice in that group. Only you didn't do it, the software did!
Download FBPoster

GGrouper
Basically allowed you to log into your Google account, and if you have a Google Group set up, you can automatically make new pages in the group based on a set of keywords you give it in a text file.
Download GGrouper

VeohBlack
A bit more complicated than the first two software, VeohBlack made it easy to register accounts at the Veoh video site. It could then use the accounts to search for particular types of videos and make comments on them. It could even click to the next page of videos if you wanted.
Download VeohBlack

Web Automation with the PHP Programming Language and cURL Module

Here is a showcase of web automation software I had written myself using the programming language PHP and a browser emulation module called cURL. If you want to take a look at the code, feel free to download it.

What is PHP?
Also known as Hypertext Preprocessor, PHP is a very popular scripting language mainly used among web developers to produce dynamic web pages. Pages that can load quickly, from databases of information, and are interactive. Unlike a typical web page using just markup languages like HTML and CSS.

What is cURL?
cURL is a module or library you can install on PHP that lets you transfer information via web protocols, such as HTTP. Think of cURL as a browser, kind of like Internet Explorer or Firefox. Only instead of you, the internet user, viewing the web pages with your eyes and clicking around navigating with your mouse, cURL can help read what a website is saying, and can spit back information in response. Like a browser, it's a way for two computers to talk to each other over the internet.

PHP + cURL = Powerful combination that mimics a human using a web browser
Using these two powerful pieces of software, I have written and developed my own software scripts that can mimic your typical web user as if it were a person visiting the site.

Twtr
This software program revolves around Twitter, the popular social networking website. Twtr uses PHP/cURL to access Twitter's API, a REST oriented API given out freely to developers to make apps and games for the site. Twtr uses the login information for all the Twitter accounts you give it from a text file, grabs a proxy for each one, and then automatically updates your Twitter account automatically. So you can say whatever you want, automatically, without even being at your computer. You can set it to post once a week, everyday, or even every minute.
Download Twtr

WPBlogr
Perhaps my most sophisticated software in this PHP/cURL portfolio. WPBlogr allows you to automatically post to Wordpress blogs that you control using XML-RPC which is the direct predecessor to the increasingly popular SOAP web services. Some bloggers have multiple blogs, and seriously, who wants to spend time logging into each one of them one by one and posting? In a few text or CSV files, list the blog URLs, the login credentials, and the topics you want to write about, then WPBlogr takes it from there. The software logs into each blog, then writes and publishes a post about each topic you list. The coolest part about it was that, if you wanted, it could automatically pull a fair use amount of text from Google BlogSearch based on each keyword you gave it, shuffle sentences and words, and still make the paragraph readable. You could easily set it to how many sentences you wanted to output per post. All with the magic of PHP programming.
Download WPBlogr


Notebookr
Sometimes setting up a multitude of quick web pages was necessary in my line of work. Google used to provide a service called Google Notebook (no longer in development), which basically allowed you to create little note pages and share them on the web. Notebookr had the ability to log into Google Notebook with your account, and create multiple notebook pages based on a list of keywords you give it in a text file. Probably the coolest thing about this program was it automatically scoured the web for text related to your keywords, scooped it up and wrote a little paragraph about your subject.
Download Notebookr

Rubylinkr
This is a simple little script that used the URL shortener service RubyURL. You see people using URL shorteners like Bit.Ly on Twitter all the time.  But instead of entering them in manually, one by one, my programmed script, Rubylinkr takes a list of links that you give it, runs them through RubyURL, and outputs all the nice shortened URLs in a neat little text file, ready for action.
Download Rubylinkr