Imperial College London
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ProfessorTimothyHorbury

Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Physics

Professor of Physics
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 7676t.horbury Website

 
 
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Location

 

6M65Huxley BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Owens:2014:10.1002/2014SW001064,
author = {Owens, MJ and Horbury, TS and Wicks, RT and McGregor, SL and Savani, NP and Xiong, M},
doi = {10.1002/2014SW001064},
journal = {Space Weather},
pages = {395--405},
title = {Ensemble downscaling in coupled solar wind-magnetosphere modeling for space weather forecasting},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2014SW001064},
volume = {12},
year = {2014}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Advanced forecasting of space weather requires simulation of the whole Sun-to-Earth system, which necessitates driving magnetospheric models with the outputs from solar wind models. This presents a fundamental difficulty, as the magnetosphere is sensitive to both large-scale solar wind structures, which can be captured by solar wind models, and small-scale solar wind “noise,” which is far below typical solar wind model resolution and results primarily from stochastic processes. Following similar approaches in terrestrial climate modeling, we propose statistical “downscaling” of solar wind model results prior to their use as input to a magnetospheric model. As magnetospheric response can be highly nonlinear, this is preferable to downscaling the results of magnetospheric modeling. To demonstrate the benefit of this approach, we first approximate solar wind model output by smoothing solar wind observations with an 8 h filter, then add small-scale structure back in through the addition of random noise with the observed spectral characteristics. Here we use a very simple parameterization of noise based upon the observed probability distribution functions of solar wind parameters, but more sophisticated methods will be developed in the future. An ensemble of results from the simple downscaling scheme are tested using a model-independent method and shown to add value to the magnetospheric forecast, both improving the best estimate and quantifying the uncertainty. We suggest a number of features desirable in an operational solar wind downscaling scheme.
AU  - Owens,MJ
AU  - Horbury,TS
AU  - Wicks,RT
AU  - McGregor,SL
AU  - Savani,NP
AU  - Xiong,M
DO  - 10.1002/2014SW001064
EP  - 405
PY  - 2014///
SN  - 1539-4956
SP  - 395
TI  - Ensemble downscaling in coupled solar wind-magnetosphere modeling for space weather forecasting
T2  - Space Weather
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2014SW001064
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/39011
VL  - 12
ER  -
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