ISWAT - International Space Weather Action Teams 

Action Team: Ambient Solar Wind Validation Team

Team ID: H1-01

Team Leads

• Martin Reiss (NASA/GSFC, USA), martin.a.reiss@outlook.com (lead)
• Karin Muglach (NASA/GSFC, USA), karin.muglach@nasa.gov (co-lead)
• Barbara Perri (Astronome-Adjointe au CNAP, OSUPS, Saclay, France), barbara.perri@universite-paris-saclay.fr (co-lead)
• Evangelia Samara (NASA/GSFC, USA), evangelia.samara@nasa.gov (co-lead)

Mission Statement

Our mission is to provide the space weather community with an assessment of the state-of-the-art in ambient solar wind modeling at Earth, other planetary environments, and space explorers. To this end, we are developing an open access platform hosted at NASA's CCMC for validating ambient solar wind models by comparing their solutions with in situ measurements from space explorers. The new online platform, as part of the Comprehensive Assessment of Models and Events using Library Tools (CAMEL; Raststaetter et al., 2019) framework, will allow the space weather community to test the abilities of solar wind models with unified metrics providing an unbiased assessment of progress over time.

Motivation

The rate at which we develop and update space weather models has outpaced the rate at which we build our data and validation infrastructure. Consequently, questions such as" How well does a model perform over a given time interval?" or" How much has this model improved over the past five years?" are, if at all, difficult to answer. Progress in space weather research and awareness, therefore, benefits from community-coordinated strategies and procedures for validation.

Objectives

This action team brings together solar and heliospheric domain experts, model and application developers, data providers, forecasters, and end-users of space weather products with the following objectives.

1. Develop a comprehensive model metadata architecture for ambient solar wind models, as well as metrics agreed upon by the community.
2. Implement an open online platform in collaboration with NASA's CCMC to validate solar wind models with internationally recognized metrics.
3. Evaluate the current state of space environment models, tools, and techniques for forecasting the solar wind conditions at Earth and other locations in our solar system.
4. Use our developed infrastructure to maintain up-to-date validation results in the future and communicate them to end-users and the community.

Why contribute?

• Benefit from the synergy between domain experts, model and application developers, data providers, forecasters, and end-users of space weather products that the team activity enables.
• Stay up-to-date with the progress in ambient solar wind modeling.
• Increase exposure of your solar wind model to the international community.
• Actively shape the direction the team is developing and facilitate progress.

How to contribute?

You can provide data files to be included in CAMEL for a model validation study by following two easy steps.

1. First, we need your solar wind model solutions, or more specifically, the modeled physical properties at the L1 point. Currently, CAMEL can only take 1-D time-series data. The expected data file formats are ASCII/TEXT files with date/time and physical properties in separate columns (see file format). We encourage you to provide as long a time series as possible. If you want to contribute to the community challenge on model validation (see below), we ask that the solutions include pre-defined time intervals. All files added to CAMEL are publicly accessible via this public GitLab repository.
    
2. Second, a comprehensive metadata architecture is needed to support a sustainable validation analysis. In Reiss et al. (2022), we proposed seven types of metadata, all of which are required to register new community models in the online platform (see model metadata form). These metadata components include information on the observational input data, data preprocessing, model description, model setting, and model solution. We will store the metadata components in a metadata template file according to the Space Physics Archive Search and Extract (SPASE) standards. Users can access this metadata information alongside the model solutions via the user interface. 

Please contact the team leads if you are interested in providing data files to be added to CAMEL for a validation study. 

How to Contribute to Real-Time Validation

To contribute to our real-time validation effort, please follow the steps below.

• The file format for contributing to real-time validation is the same as for historical validation. Use ASCII/TEXT files with separate columns for date and physical properties (see file format).
• Reach out to our team lead, Barbara Perri, at barbara.perri@universite-paris-saclay.fr. Provide her with the name and version of your model. Once we receive the necessary details, we will promptly set up the folder on our FTP server for you. You will then receive further instructions on accessing and using the server.
• You are expected to upload your model solutions at least once a day. This regular upload ensures that we can display your model solutions in real-time on the online platform.

If you have any questions or need assistance, please get in touch with Barbara Perri.

Community Challenge

To evaluate the current state of ambient solar wind models, tools, and forecasting techniques, we would like to study pre-defined time intervals by comparing a collection of model solutions with in situ measurements. Model solutions provided by team members from computationally efficient codes should include at least the years 2008, 2012, and 2020. In contrast, model solutions from computationally heavy codes should include Carrington Rotations (CR) 2075 to CR 2077 and CR 2231.

Publications

• [Open Access] Unifying the Validation of Ambient Solar Wind Models. M. A. Reiss, K. Muglach, R. Mullinix, M. M. Kuznetsova, C. Wiegand, M. Temmer, C. N. Arge, S. Dasso, S.F. Fung, J. Gonzalez-Aviles, S. Gonzi, L. Jian, P. MacNeice, C. Möstl, M. Owens, B. Perri, R. F. Pinto, L. Rastätter, E. Samara. Advances in Space Research, May 2022. 
   
• [Open Access] Comprehensive Assessment of Models and Events Using Library Tools (CAMEL) Framework: Time Series Comparisons. L. Rastätter, C. P. Wiegand, R. Mullinix, P. J. MacNeice. AGU Space Weather, May 2019. 

Links

[Early Access Version] [CAMEL] [CCMC Scoreboards]

ISWAT Clusters with overlapping topics

S2, S3, H2