EUHFORIA POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCHER
TWO-YEARS POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCHER POSITION IN NUMERICAL MODELLING OF THE IONOSPHERE, IRAP, Toulouse France:
Summary:
Following call to tender SU-SPACE-22-SEC-2019: Space Weather, in the frame Horizon2020, EUHFORIA 2.0 project (PI: S. Poedts, KU Leuven, Belgium) has been recently selected. It aims at developing the world’s most advanced space weather forecasting tool and will address geoeffectiveness, impacts and mitigation, including extreme events, related to solar eruptions, solar wind streams and Solar Energetic Particles, with particular emphasis on its application to forecast Geomagnetically Induced Currents (GICs) and radiation on geospace. In this context, IRAP-CNRS (Toulouse France) is involved in the development of the GICs forecasting work package by providing forecasts of geomagnetic variations at any point on the ground. The main points of this work package are first the coupling of IPIM ionosphere model and IMM electrodynamics model, already developed in the group at IRAP, and then the development of a Biot-Savart module, which will use the output for the coupled models to calculate the ionospheric horizontal currents responsible for the GICs. IRAP ionosphere group is seeking a post-doctoral researcher to lead the aforementioned developments.
Job requirements and Qualifications:
Work location: Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (CNRS), Toulouse, France
Appointment conditions:
(1) Position: Postdoctoral researcher for 24 month
(2) Gross yearly Salary: between approx. 36000 and 44400€ (depending on experience)
(3) Insurance enrollment: Health insurance, Welfare pension, Employment insurance, Workers compensation insurance
Opening of the position: from 1st March 2020 and until position is filled
Research area: ionospheric and magnetospheric physics
Qualifications: applicants must satisfy the following conditions:
(1) holds a PhD in space physics or atmospheric physics
(2) has skills in computer programming
(3) does not have other primary occupation
Inquiries:
Dr. Aurélie Marchaudon and Dr. Pierre-Louis Blelly
IRAP/CNRS, 9 avenue du Colonel Roche, 31400 Toulouse, France
Email : aurelie.marchaudon@irap.omp.eu ; pierre-louis.blelly@irap.omp.eu
Application submission:
The application must be sent by email to Dr. Aurélie Marchaudon and Dr. Pierre-Louis Blelly and should contain:
1. Curriculum Vitae (2 pages),
2. Summary of research achievements (2 pages),
3. List of publications,
4. Name and contact of two professional references
Detailed description of the project:
The IRAP ionosphere group has long-standing expertise in the development of ionospheric models. First principle models of the ionosphere have been developed from the nineties, first for the high latitude region with the TRANSCAR model (Blelly et al., 1996; 2005) and then for mid and low latitudes with the IPIM model (Marchaudon and Blelly , 2015; Marchaudon et al., 2018; Blelly et al., 2019) taking into account the interhemispheric coupling via the plasmasphere region. Depending on the chosen spatial resolution, these models can efficiently describe multi-scale processes. In parallel, an Ionosphere- Magnetosphere electrodynamics Model IMM (Peymirat and Fontaine, 1994) has also been developed, with integration in recent years of the Tsyganenko T96 model for the magnetic field (Hurtaud et al., 2007) thereby improving the electrodynamics description. A few years ago, these models IPIM/TRANSCAR and IMM had been successfully coupled (Blelly, 2003), allowing a good description of the ionosphere medium with self-consistent energy inputs and sufficiently fast for space-weather forecasting. The group has also long technical expertise in ground-based instrumentation such as HF coherent radars (SuperDARN), incoherent radars (EISCAT) and ground-based magnetometers, as well as numerical and analytic methodological development for analyzing the data.
Following call to tender SU-SPACE-22-SEC-2019: Space Weather, in the frame Horizon2020, EUHFORIA 2.0 project (PI: S. Poedts, KU Leuven, Belgium) has been recently selected. It aims at developing the world’s most advanced space weather forecasting tool and will address geoeffectiveness, impacts and mitigation, including extreme events, related to solar eruptions, solar wind streams and Solar Energetic Particles, with particular emphasis on its application to forecast Geomagnetically Induced Currents (GICs) and radiation on geospace. In this context, IRAP-CNRS (Toulouse France) is involved in the development of the GICs forecasting work package by providing forecasts of geomagnetic variations at any point on the ground. The IRAP ionosphere group is thus seeking a post-doctoral researcher to lead these developments. More specifically, the work of the post-doctoral fellow will be divided in three tasks:
Task 1: during the first 6 months, a selection of magnetic storms will be done in order to carry out reference simulations with the IPIM model. These simulations will use realistic ionospheric convection inputs from SuperDARN and field-aligned current distribution derived from IRIDIUM-AMPERE. The results of the simulation will be calibrated using ionosondes or incoherent radars dataset according to a validation process developed by the team. The goal is to characterize the global environment for Magnetosphere-Ionosphere-Thermosphere system before the storm as well as the dynamics following the trigger.
Task 2: during the next 12 months, the IMM model will be extended to high-latitudes, where the terrestrial magnetic field is directly interacting with the solar wind. To do so, limits conditions along the polar boundary of the auroral oval will be modified through a field-aligned current model which will extend in the polar cap and which will be parametrized through coupling functions depending on solar wind parameters. These parameters are measured at L1, allowing 30 to 90 min forecast of the Earth’s electrodynamics. In a second step, the IPIM and IMM models will be coupled and constrained by these coupling functions. Simulations of the new coupled IPIM-IMM model will be run on the magnetic storms events identified during Task 1 and compared to the results obtained with the IPIM-only model (with SuperDARN and AMPERE in inputs), in order to validate the coupling functions and the coupled model IPIM-IMM.
Task 3: during the last 6 months, the coupled IPIM-IMM model will be used to build a realistic ionospheric conductivity model including photoionization, precipitation and neutral atmosphere. Depending on operational needs, this conductivity model will be implemented either in the IMM model to retrieve self-consistent electrodynamics (forecast need) or used with SuperDARN convection maps (real-time need) to provide horizontal current maps. The Biot-Savart module, which will be developed to calculate the ground-level magnetic field perturbations induced by these currents, will then be used to provide necessary inputs for computing GIC maps.
Bibliography
Blelly, P.-L. (2003), SpaceGRID Study Final Report. SGD-SYS-DAT-TN-100-1.2. Issue 1.2. SpaceGRID Consortium.
Blelly, P. -L., C. Lathuillère, B. Emery, J. Lilensten, J. Fontanari, and D. Alcaydé (2005), An extended TRANSCAR model including ionospheric convection: Simulation of EISCAT observations using inputs from AMIE, Ann. Geophys., 23, 419–431, doi:10.5194/angeo-23-419-2005.
Blelly, P.-L., A. Marchaudon, M. Indurain, O. Witasse, J. Amaya, B. Chide, N. André, V. Génot, A. Goutenoir, M. Bouchemit (2019), Transplanet: a web service dedicated to modeling of planetary ionospheres, Planetary and Space Science, 169, 35-44, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pss.2019.02.008.
Blelly, P. -L., A. Robineau, J. Lilensten, and D. Lummerzheim (1996), 8-moment fluid models of the terrestrial high-latitude ionosphere between 100 and 3000 km, in Solar Terrestrial Energy Program Ionospheric Model Handbook, edited by R. Schunk, pp. 53–72, Utah State Univ., Logan.
Hurtaud, Y., C. Peymirat, and A. D. Richmond (2007), Modeling seasonal and diurnal effects on ionospheric conductances, region-2 currents, and plasma convection in the inner magnetosphere, J. Geophys. Res., 112, A09217, doi:10.1029/2007JA012257.
Marchaudon, A., and P.-L. Blelly, (2015), A new interhemispheric 16-moment model of the plasmasphere-ionosphere system: IPIM, J. Geophys. Res. Space Physics, 120, doi:10.1002/2015JA021193.
Marchaudon, A., P.-L. Blelly, M. Grandin, A. Aikio, A. Kozlovsky, and I. Virtanen (2018), IPIM modeling of the ionospheric F2-layer depletion at high-latitudes during a high-speed stream event, J. Geophys. Res. Space Physics, 123, 7051-7066, https://doi.org/10.1002/2018JA025744.
Peymirat, C., and D. Fontaine (1994), Numerical simulation of magnetospheric convection including the effect of field-aligned currents and electron precipitation, J. Geophys. Res., 99(A6), 11,155–11,176.