At the end of 2020, a paper that I had worked on for far too long was finally accepted. It was a paper that I thought was okay if not interesting. I had one co-author who was insistent that this was a big deal and we should be pushing for publicity; I was more skeptical on the matter.
Apparently I should listen to my co-authors more.
The work can be found in AGU’s Space Weather journal and is entitled, Numerical Simulations of the geospace response to the arrival of an idealized perfect interplanetary coronal mass ejection. It explores the ground magnetic response to the very first moments of a hypothetical worst-case-scenario space weather storm – a “storm sudden impulse“. This is the phase of the storm where the solar wind material compresses the Earth’s magnetic field and drives impulsive magnetic signatures on the ground. We simulated two cases that considered different configurations of the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF), or the magnetic field entrained in the solar wind. The figure below shows time series of the evolution of the storm once it arrives at Earth.
Not surprisingly, our simulations showed that such an event would create huge electromagnetic pulses on the Earth’s surface, likely putting the power grid to bed in short order. Emphasis on not surprising- hit the Earth hard and get a big response, right?
Well, the paper hasn’t even gone through the proofing/typesetting stage yet, and it’s drawing some attention. Spaceweather.com has blogged on the article (permalink to the story here). I’ve also been asked to discuss the result in the Weather Brains podcast sometime in March (I’ll post more when I know that’s going to happen). Finally, I’ve received a lot more interest and questions about this work from a broader audience than I’d typically expect.
This is modest attention, but a new experience for me. I am much more accustomed to having my work discussed amongst other researchers in a technical setting. It’s very satisfying to see this work get picked up and shared by enthusiasts.