PhD in IAGA #3

IAGA has a lot of different scientists working on various topics. In this series of blogs, we will introduce some topics that are being worked on by PhD students. Hopefully this will give a better picture of the work being done in the field and encourage more early career researchers.

Samuel Fielding, a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, says:

My research topic is looking at the current forecasting capabilities within the field of space weather, and trying to improve them and find new avenues of research within the field using machine learning. With the large amounts of data being collected on space weather from the many satellites currently in orbit around the Earth or at the L1 Lagrange point, there is a lot of data to train machine learning algorithms on, and the Earth-Sun system is currently not well modelled by current physical models because of the complexity of interactions within the system. This means that the field is a perfect place to explore machine learning models, and it is a very active field with a lot of research on optimising current prediction models. Can these models be optimised further, and looking forwards, is machine learning the right way for us to predict space weather events?

 

False-colour image of a solar eclipse from 21 August 2017. Copyright Miroslay Druckmuller. As published in SciTechDaily, 21 June 2021 and Habbal et al. 2021.