Space Weather impacts numerous facets of everyday life and can have detrimental effects on engineering infrastructure, such as the power grid, satellites, navigation systems, avionics, air travel, telecommunications and more. Therefore space weather prediction is critical to forewarning of solar events that could generate severe space weather at Earth.
Our research addresses this need for predictive capabilities by developing and improving high-performance, first-principles computational models to describe and predict the hazardous conditions in the near Earth space leading to geomagnetic storms. I employ a combination of global, multi-physics, large-scale numerical models together with measurements from space borne instruments and ground based stations to study the dynamics of plasmas and electromagnetic fields in the geospace environment. These include three-dimensional global magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) magnetospheric modeling, kinetic drift physics simulations as well as data analysis and interpretation from the TWINS, Cluster, NOAA-POES, THEMIS, Van Allen Probes spacecrafts.
The kinetic theory is useful to model analytically the observations and related physical mechanisms through the dispersion properties of plasma waves and their stability mechanism. The group works focus is to develop analytical modeling by incorporating different effects (wave-particle interaction, effect of heavy ions, temperature anisotropy and the inhomogeneity in the plasma parameters) to explain the particle acceleration and transport throughout the solar and magnetospheric environments.
Combining numerical modeling with space mission data quantitatively addresses the flow of energetic particles through the magnetosphere as influenced by global fields, kinetic effects, and loss processes. This provides critical insight into the complex physics describing the Sun’s effects on near Earth space in global unified way.
Opportunities
There are many opportunities in my group for undergraduate students, prospective graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Please contact me if interested.