Grant Stephens
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Physics
During magnetic storms, energy from the solar wind (the stream of charged particles flowing from the Sun) pours into the space around Earth and rapidly reshapes the magnetosphere, the region controlled by Earth's magnetic field. To understand these events, scientists need maps of the magnetic field and the electric currents that shape it.
- Fields
Physics
Earth & Environmental Science
Astronomy & Astrophysics
- Topics
space physics
space weather
magnetosphere
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Release the first combined storm-substorm empirical model of Earth's magnetospheric magnetic field, together with its machine learning data mining algorithms, as open-source software in modern programming languages.
- Generate precomputed reconstructions of the global magnetosphere at five-minute cadence for 1995–2024, using data mining that matches spacecraft measurements from similar past storms.
- Build a Run-on-Request tool and computing infrastructure so users can produce custom event reconstructions, supporting data-assimilative and gray-box magnetospheric modeling.
More about the research
That is hard, because the magnetosphere is enormous and only a few spacecraft sample it at any time. Traditional empirical models, known as Tsyganenko models, are simple and widely used. However, their rigid structure cannot keep up with the fast changes during storms and substorms, which are shorter bursts of activity.
Why it matters
Magnetic storms affect the near-Earth space environment. Better reconstructions of the magnetic field during storms could help space weather forecasting move beyond single global activity indices toward predictions that vary by location. Openly available software and precomputed data products could let many space physicists study individual storm events in detail without costly computation.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Shinichi Ohtani
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Earth & Environmental Science
Identify the internal and external conditions under which the dawnside wedge current system appears during geomagnetic storms, using SuperMAG-selected events and probability distributions of solar wind and magnetospheric parameters.
Kun Zhang
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Daytona Beach, FL·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure how the reflection rate, velocity, temperatures and velocity distribution types of freshly reflected ions at Earth's bow shock depend on solar wind speed, interplanetary magnetic field, Mach number, beta and shock angle, using satellite measurements.
Craig Martin
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Earth & Environmental Science
Characterize the magnetic minerals in modern coral skeletons from living reefs, using rock-magnetic analyses and microscopy.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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