Understanding stormtime geospace as a complex, coupled system: Recent progress from the Center for Geospace Storms

The Center for Geospace Storms (CGS) is a NASA DRIVE Science Center focused on geospace science. CGS is pursuing the goal of developing an understanding of the stormtime geospace as a complex system exhibiting strong coupling across physical regimes, domains and particle populations, which occurs across disparate spatiotemporal scales. CGS is tackling this problem via a concerted effort using both data analysis from heterogeneous sources (e.g., in situ, remote sensing and ground-based platforms) and physics-based modeling. In particular, the CGS team is developing the Multiscale Atmosphere-Geospace Environment (MAGE) model that couples all the relevant domains of geospace while doing it at sufficiently high resolution to capture key cross-scale interactions. In this presentation, we discuss recent work from the CGS team concentrating on high- to mid-latitude magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling in stormtime geospace. We discuss the novel model of energetic particle precipitation in MAGE, based on gray-box modeling of wave-induced particle precipitation, and its applications to high-resolution modeling of the aurora. We show examples of simulations of mesoscale auroral forms, such as giant undulations, and their connection to inner magnetosphere dynamics, including the subauroral polarization streams. We also review our recent efforts on developing a new high-resolution (in space and energy) inner magnetosphere model. Finally, we conclude the talk by emphasizing the interconnectedness of stormtime geospace using the May’24 superstorm as an example.