Developing the Space Weather Modeling Framework

Space weather describes the interactions in the Sun-Earth system that affect human technologies and health, including damage to satellites, loss of communication, degraded accuracy of global positioning systems, safety of astronauts, air plane pilots and passengers flying along polar routes. Modeling and eventually predicting space weather is therefore a practically important challenge.
The Center for Space Environment Modeling (CSEM) at the University of Michigan has been at the forefront of physics-based space weather modeling. Our group has developed the Space Weather Modeling Framework (SWMF) that integrates independently developed models into a high performance simulation tool. The SWMF models physics domains spanning from the solar corona and heliosphere to the magnetosphere, ionosphere and thermosphere of the Earth.
The SWMF can perform a realistic Sun-to-thermosphere simulation faster than real time on today's supercomputers.
I will describe the SWMF and some of the numerical techniques that enable it to achieve the required performance. In particular I plan to talk about a new scheme for modeling Hall MHD on block adaptive grids.