CLASP PhD student Agnit Mukhopadhyay received the Runner-Up Award for a presentation he gave at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society last week in Boston, MA.
The talk was part of the AMS Student Presentation Contest at the 17th Annual Conference on Space Weather. The conference is sponsored by the AMS and organized by the Committee on Space Weather, and it offers two student award opportunities for participating students. Award consideration criteria include:
- Originality of the work
- Relevance to space weather research and/or applications
- Quality of the presentation and its delivery
- Relation to the AMS meeting theme
Mr. Mukhopadhyay’s presentation was entitled “A Study in Skill: Improving dB/dt Predictions Using Advanced Conductance Models.”
“The presentation was based on improving the ionospheric conductance within global magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) models using increased datasets, advanced algorithms and physics. Through my study, I showed that improvements to conductance in the auroral region results in improving our model’s space weather predictive skill (the quantity dB/dt), which has enormous impacts on operational predictions of geomagnetically induced current (GIC), an important aspect of space weather on the ground. GICs can adversely affect electrical power grids, railway lines, pipelines, etc. during extreme space weather events, and my presentation at AMS addressed this problem with improved predictions in the auroral conductance of our global models. The global model in question is the Space Weather Modeling Framework (SWMF), whose geospace version is currently being used operationally at the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC).”
Congratulations, Agnit!
