The development and validation of a ‘flux-corrected transport’ based solution methodology for the plasmasphere refilling problem following geomagnetic storms

Abstract

Abstract The refilling of the plasmasphere following geomagnetic storms remains one of the longstanding and interesting problems in ionosphere–magnetosphere coupling research. The objective of this paper is the formulation and development of a one-dimensional (1D) refilling model using the flux-corrected transport method, a numerical method that is well-suited to handling problems with shocks and discontinuities. In this paper, the developed methodology has been validated against exact, analytical benchmarks, and good agreement has been obtained between these analytical benchmarks and numerical results. The objective of this research is the development of a three-dimensional (3D) multi-ion model for ionosphere–magnetosphere coupling problems in open and closed line geometries.

Keywords

• Ionosphere–magnetosphere coupling
• Plasmasphere refilling
• Geomagnetic storm
• Hydrodynamic modeling
• Flux-corrected transport