Paper#: 42
Poster #:
Session Name: Plenary
Room: West Ballroom
Day: Tuesday
Time: 9:45-10:10 a.m.
Abstract Title: Collective Behavior and Magnetospheric Substorms
PresentSurname: Baker, D.N.
All Authors: D.N. Baker
Abstract : The Earth’s space environment has often been considered a natural plasma laboratory. Examination of recent trends in data analysis and modeling shows quite clearly that powerful concepts in statistical physics and applied mathematics are regularly being incorporated into space plasma physical research. Growing numbers of methods for modeling complex systems, data assimilation, system estimation, and predictive methods have been applied to the recent wealth of ionospheric and magnetospheric data. On the one hand, predictive methods are very important from the practical point of view. These methods work by representing global modes of a space plasma process in terms of a dynamical system. Nonlinear prediction schemes have greatly improved space weather forecasting and in most instances they remain more accurate and faster than physics-based models. On the other hand, self-organized criticality has recently been used to explain power law spectra observed in space plasma domains such as the plasma sheet and its low-altitude extention in the ionosphere. Self-organized criticality arises in the interaction of current sheets with a nonlinear type of (usually current-driven) anomalous transport. Clearly, multi-point measurements are allowing us to measure the spatial and temporal development of global phenomena that constitute substorms. In this regard, collective behavior in magnetospheric plasmas and the understanding of it using modern theoretical tools will be invaluable in the study of space plasmas.