ISWAT - International Space Weather Action Teams

Action Team: Ambient Solar Wind Validation Team

Team ID: H1-01

Team Leads:

• Martin Reiss (Space Research Institute, IWF, Graz, Austria), martin.reiss@oeaw.ac.at (lead)
• Karin Muglach (NASA Goddard, USA), karin.muglach@nasa.gov (co-lead)

Introduction:

Validation analysis plays a crucial role in space weather research and prediction. First and foremost to inform developers and users of space weather models about the strengths and limitations of the models, and also to provide an unbiased assessment of progress over time. The objective of this action team is to establish a central hub for the ambient solar wind modelling community, allowing developers and users to assess the accuracy of state-of-the-art solar wind model results seamlessly. To this end, we choose and agree on a set of comprehensive validation metrics from scientific literature and integrate them into the existing Comprehensive Assessment of Models and Events using Library Tools (CAMEL; Raststaetter et al., 2019) framework. The CAMEL web app hosted by NASA's Community Coordinated Modelling Center is an interactive visualisation tool allowing developers and users to compare space weather and space science model output to observations. Specifically, we make use of the CAMEL framework to study the relationship between model output (e.g., solar wind speed, density, temperature, magnetic polarity, and magnetic sector boundary crossings) and observational data in terms of point-to-point statistics and more advanced event-based validation measures.

Objectives:

Our objectives are summarised as follows.

1. Collect and display modern science and prediction models of the evolving ambient solar wind.
2. Evaluate how well these models predict the properties of the evolving ambient solar wind in the near-Earth environment.
3. Provide a continuous validation analysis to trace the progress of ambient solar wind models. 
4. Use the developed infrastructure to facilitate the validation of real-time prediction and to establish an ambient solar wind scoreboard.

Action items:

• Deduce a set of comprehensive validation metrics reflecting the community needs.
• Integrate the deduced validation metrics in the CAMEL framework.
• Collect and display state-of-the-art solar wind model solutions. 
• Perform model assessment with CAMEL, and publish the results in the literature.
• Develop a pipeline for model developers to submit and display their solar wind predictions in real-time.
• Compare solar wind predictions after each completed Carrington rotation to pave the way for the Ambient Solar Wind Scoreboard hosted at NASA's CCMC.

Clusters with overlapping topics:

S2, S3, H2

Links to external websites: 

CAMEL Framework: https://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/camel/

Real-time Validation Analysis: http://swe.uni-graz.at/index.php/services/eswf-verification