FG: Quantitative Assessment of Radiation Belt Modeling

Focus Group Leaders:

• Jay Albert
• Wen Li
• Steve Morley
• Weichao Tu

Focus Group Proposal

Quantitative Assessment of Radiation Belt Modeling (December 2013)

2014 GEM Announcement

At this year's GEM Summer Workshop we will start a new Focus Group on "Quantitative Assessment of Radiation Belt Modeling". The goals of our FG are to bring together the current state-of-art models for the acceleration, transport, and loss processes in radiation belts, develop event-specific and global wave, plasma, and magnetic field models to drive these radiation belt models, and combine all these components to achieve a quantitative assessment of radiation belt modeling by validating against contemporary radiation belt measurements.

Five sessions have been planned for the upcoming GEM workshop:

Session 1 (Tue, 10:30-12:15 PM): "Joint Session with Radiation Belts & Wave Modeling focus group". In this joint session, the RBWM FG (finishing this year) will wrap up their accomplishments in the past 5 years and then set up the stage for our introduction of the new FG of Quantitative Assessment of Radiation Belt Modeling. We will discuss the remaining open questions in RB modeling and connect them to our FG goals and challenges.

Session 2 (Tue, 01:30-03:00 PM): "Review existing RB models and discuss where we are and what are needed". In this session, we solicit short presentations discussing the existing models for the acceleration, transport, and loss of radiation belt particles. In general, we welcome talks that not only showcase their results, but also include discussions like: "Mechanism ____ is evidently necessary, though not sufficient since ___." We will discuss questions such as: what are "standard" RB codes not doing well enough? vs. What are we not doing at all but probably should be?

Session 3 (Tue, 03:30-05:00 PM): "Various magnetospheric wave characteristics and their global distribution required in RB modeling". In this session, we solicit short presentations focusing on characterizing various wave properties that are required as inputs to RB models. The topics will cover ULF waves, chorus and hiss, EMIC waves, magnetosonic waves, etc., and their effects on RB particles. We will review the available wave models and discuss what are still missing for RB modeling.

Session 4 (Wed, 10:30-12:15 PM): "Seed populations, plasma density, and magnetic field configuration required in RB modeling". In this session, we solicit short presentations specifying other required inputs for driving RB simulations, which include particle seed populations, plasma density, magnetic field configuration, last closed drift shell, etc. Again, we will review what are currently available and discuss what are still missing.

Session 5 (Wed, 01:30-03:00 PM): "Wrap-up discussion and plan for future FG activities". In this final session, we will wrap up this year’s FG with more big-picture discussions, and plan for future FG activities for mini-GEM and next year. One important future activity is the 'RB dropout' and 'RB buildup' Challenges. Here we solicit short presentations proposing interesting dropout/buildup events for our future challenges.

If you would like to present in any of these sessions, please send your talk title and the relevant session number to Weichao Tu (wtu@lanl.gov) by June 6, 2014. We will review the talks and announce the detailed session agenda before the meeting. Participation in discussions and brief walk-in talks are always welcomed.

Thank you in advance for your contributions!

Weichao Tu (wtu@lanl.gov), Jay Albert (jay.albert@us.af.mil), Wen Li (moonli@atmos.ucla.edu), Steve Morley (smorley@lanl.gov)