Colloquium: Dr. Natalia Buzulukova | University of Maryland

TITLE:  Modern Global 3D Modeling of the Earth’s Magnetosphere-Ionosphere System: 
State of the Art, Examples, and Open Questions

ABSTRACT: Geospace is a complex, multi-scale system composed of strongly interconnected regions governed by different physical regimes. In the magnetosphere, plasma is largely collisionless and kinetic effects can be essential, while the ionosphere and upper atmosphere involve collisional electrodynamics. The Earth’s magnetosphere contains different plasma populations, including cold plasma of ionospheric origin with characteristic energies of a few eV, ring current plasma with characteristic energies of tens to hundreds of keV, and radiation belt plasma with characteristic energies in the MeV range.

The solar wind supplies energy to this system through magnetic reconnection at the dayside magnetopause, allowing solar wind magnetic field lines to become connected to the ionosphere and enabling the magnetosphere to operate as a giant MHD generator. During geomagnetic storms, substorms, and solar wind pressure pulses, enhanced solar wind driving produces major changes in magnetospheric convection and field-aligned currents, which in turn affect the ring current plasma, radiation belt populations, and plasmaspheric structure. This complexity makes Geospace an inherently challenging system to represent within a single numerical model. 

This talk will review the development of modern coupled numerical approaches for modeling Geospace, with particular emphasis on the Space Weather Modeling Framework (SWMF) and its coupling to the Comprehensive Inner Magnetosphere Ionosphere (CIMI) model. SWMF provides a modular framework in which global magnetohydrodynamic descriptions of the magnetosphere can be coupled to specialized modules, including CIMI, which represents the inner magnetosphere and its ring current, plasmasphere, and radiation belt populations.

Examples will be presented showing how the coupled SWMF-CIMI code can be used to
investigate the response of Geospace to different solar wind drivers, and how model-data comparisons with observations help identify the physical processes that control the global response. Open questions, current challenges, and new approaches for future research and model development will be discussed.

The talk will conclude with a brief illustration of how modeling of the inner magnetosphere can inform practical space weather problems through the example of shallow internal charging, a recently identified spacecraft hazard associated with enhanced fluxes of ~100–300 keV electrons at geosynchronous orbit.

Bio: Dr. Natalia Buzulukova
Associate Research Scientist, Astronomy Department, University of Maryland College Park
(UMD)
Associate Director, Partnership for Heliophysics and Space Environment Research (PHaSER)
PHaSER UMD PI and Faculty Liaison
Research Scientist, Heliophysics Division, Research and Analysis Branch, NASA GSFC

Natalia Buzulukova graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) in 1997 with a degree in Applied Physics and Mathematics. As a postgraduate student, she studied nanotubes and fullerenes at the Moscow Institute of Biochemical Physics from 1997 to 1998. In 1998, she moved to the Space Research Institute in Moscow and began working in plasma physics and data analysis under the supervision of Yuri Galperin, receiving her PhD degree in Physics and Mathematics in 2003. From 2003 to 2007, she held a postdoctoral position at the Space Research Institute (IKI). In 2005, she received a fellowship through the President’s Grant for Government Support of Young Russian Scientists of the Russian Federation. In May 2007, she was appointed to the NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) and moved to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). At NASA GSFC, she began working on models of the Earth’s ring current and plasmasphere, as well as data analysis, under the supervision of Dr. M.-C. Fok and Dr. T. E. Moore. In 2008, she joined the NASA TWINS mission team, where she worked extensively on modeling and interpreting energetic neutral atom (ENA) emissions from the Earth’s ring current and precipitating ions.

Dr. Buzulukova is a co-developer of the Comprehensive Inner Magnetosphere-Ionosphere (CIMI) model, a bounce-averaged kinetic model of the Earth’s inner magnetosphere, and also a co-developer of the coupled CIMI-MHD BATS-R-US/SWMF framework.

Dr. Buzulukova’s scientific interests cover a broad range of topics, including magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) modeling of the Earth’s magnetosphere, magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling, modeling of the Earth’s ring current, radiation belts and plasmasphere, energetic neutral atom emissions from the ring current, space weather research and analysis. She is a research scientist at Astronomy Department of UMD, and NASA GSFC Heliophysics Division Research and Analysis Branch. She currently serves as a PI of UMD – Partnership for Heliophysics and Space Environment Research (PHaSER) cooperative agreement, and mentors UMD Honors College Team RUBIX to develop a novel low-cost CubeSat mission design.