The Space Weather Operational Readiness Development Center (SWORD, PI Tom Berger from University of Colorado in Boulder) is an international, multi-disciplinary research center where scientists, operational forecasters, industry partners, and the space weather user community will collaborate on transformative research to improve forecasts and nowcasts of orbital and cis-lunar space weather. It is one of the four NASA Space Weather Centers of Excellence.
As a space weather center, SWORD has both research and operational objectives. The research objectives are to understand the complex mechanisms that transport energy from the solar wind, through the global magnetosphere, into the ionosphere – thermosphere – mesosphere system during geomagnetic storms, and to understand how this system exchanges energy and plasma with the plasmasphere and magnetosphere to feedback on storm-time magnetospheric dynamics.
One of the operational objectives is to develop a next-generation physics-based, data assimilative, operational space weather forecasting model by coupling the magnetospheric plasma model to an ionosphere-thermosphere model.
Research funded by NASA
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