Data-driven discovery in solar terrestrial physics

Sandra Chapman CPhys FInstP FRAS
Director of the Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics University of Warwick
 

The sun, solar wind and earth’s magnetosphere exhibit non-linear multiscale processes that can couple across a broad range of space and time scales. The full dynamics is revealed in all its richness in observations. A wealth of in-situ and remote observations are available from the fastest physical timescales of interest to across multiple solar cycles. In principle, these afford the study of specific physical process such as reconnection and turbulence, and system-scale processes such as the dynamics of magnetospheres and space weather. In practice, determining the physics from observations relies upon establishing robust, reproducible patterns and laws from multipoint data in these inhomogeneously sampled, non time-stationary systems. This talk will discuss how a data driven approach can both provide fundamental physical insights, and deliver quantitative estimates of space weather risk.