Center for Space Environment Modeling

The Center for Space Environment Modeling (CSEM) is an interdisciplinary research organization of the College of Engineering, the University of Michigan. CSEM is comprised of a tightly integrated group of faculty and students from the Department of Aerospace Engineering, the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences, and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. As our nation's technologies deployed in space and on the ground become more sophisticated, they also become more vulnerable to various dynamic phenomena which occur in the near-Earth space environment. As a consequence, a national goal has been set to produce a physics-based model of the space environment, capable of providing accurate predictions of the environment in order to enable the operators of technologies to undertake mitigating practices to protect their assets from 'space weather' storms. The overall goal of CSEM is to develop high-performance, first-principles based computational models to describe and predict hazardous conditions in the near-earth space environment extending from the sun to the ionosphere, called space weather. In order to achieve predictive capability, the models must run considerably faster than real time on mid-size parallel computers. In order to achieve its ambitious goal CSEM spans accross discipline and departmental boundaries. Its participants combine expertize in modern numerical algorithms, high-performance computational science, and solar, interplanetary, magnetospheric, and ionospheric physics.