Speaker
Colloquium Speaker: Dr. Ward (Chip) Manchester IV
Research Professor, University of Michigan
Dr. Manchester received BS (1990) and PhD (2000) degrees in Astronomy from the University of Illinois, and is currently a Research Professor at the University of Michigan. He was as a Newkirk Fellow at the High Altitude Observatory where his work was on the equilibria, stability and nonlinear dynamics of magnetically-sheared atmospheres. This work focused on magnetic flux transport from the convection zone into the corona and through the heliosphere, and has contributed to basic theory and modeling efforts, which later culminated in large-scale numerical simulations performed by his graduate student. Of particular significance is the demonstration that the expansion of magnetic fields in a gravitationally stratified atmosphere naturally produces Lorentz forces that drive shear flows, leading to the formation of highly energized coronal magnetic fields associated with coronal mass ejections and flares.
In July 2000, Dr. Manchester came to the University of Michigan as a postdoc, where he implemented a flux rope model into the existing solar wind model to create the first three-dimensional magnetically-driven numerical model describing CME propagation and space weather events The application of this model has led to many discoveries of CME interaction with the solar wind. These works and others are published in more than a dozen first author papers and are summarized in a review by Manchester et al. (2017). This work paved the way for EEGGL (Eruptive Event Generator using Gibson-Low configuration), the first community tool to automatically simulate magnetically–driven CME events. This tool, developed at the University of Michigan’s Center for Space Environment Modeling (CSEM) has now been installed at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center where it is available to the community for runs on request.
Dr. Manchester is currently completing a Mars project in effort to simulate the impact of CMEs on all layers of the Mars atmosphere and has also partnered with Professor Yang Chen and graduate students (from the University of Michigan Statistics Department) in the application of machine learning models. This work has rigorously demonstrated observable thresholds, indicating near certainty of large solar flare onset, a breakthrough in the field of solar physics and space weather.