Title and Abstract
Title: The Making of the Space Weather Modeling Framework
Abstract: A successful example of research code development, community use and transition to operations is the University of Michigan's multiphysics MHD code called BATS-R-US and the Space Weather Modeling Framework (SWMF) that couples together regional domain models. The development of BATS-R-US started in the early 1990s, while SWMF was developed a decade later. Both BATS-R-US and SWMF were developed from the beginning with high parallel performance and portability in mind.
The SWMF provides the software environment and tools to couple the various models with each other. It is a fully functional, documented software framework that allows the parallel execution and efficient coupling of multiple models. The SWMF provides a high-performance computational capability to simulate the space-weather environment from the upper solar chromosphere to the Earth's upper atmosphere and/or the outer heliosphere. Currently there are more than a dozen physics domains in the SWMF, but in an actual simulation one can use any meaningful subset of the components.
In the early 2010s the CCMC evaluated three physics-based and three empirical magnetosphere (geospace) models at the request of NOAA/SWPC. Among the six models was the SWMF/Geospace configuration that included three coupled models: the global magnetosphere described by BATS-R-US, the inner magnetosphere simulated by the Rice Convection Model (RCM) and ionospheric electrodynamics solved by the Ridley Ionosphere Model (RIM). In 2014 NOAA/SWPC selected SWMF/Geospace as the first physics-based global magnetosphere model to be transitioned to operations.
This presentation will outline the current state of space weather modeling and recent developments that pave the way for new and exciting capabilities.