Space weather prediction has galvanized the attention of the research community as evidenced by the nearly 40 papers presented in 4 sessions at the 1994 spring meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The next several years should see major enhancement of our physical understanding and modeling capability as a result of agency programs and initiatives.
The Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) program of NSF is committed to developing a modular Geospace General Circulation Model (GGCM) to predict how geospace reacts to given solar wind conditions. This model is to be modularized and sized to be a basic tool in the work station environment of the typical research scientist as well as being adaptable for special purpose applications. The GEM program held its third annual workshop in Colorado in June, 1994, focusing on understanding boundary layer dynamics, magnetotail dynamics and substorm initiation, topics which are necessary building blocks in the development of the GGCM.
The Space Physics Division of NASA is considering a Quantitative Magnetospheric Predictions Program (QMPP) to serve as a technology transition payoff for the physical understanding that will result from the analysis of the data base from the Global Geospace Science (GGS) mission and its international counterparts in the coordinated International Solar Terrestrial Physics (ISTP) mission. QMPP will take a globally comprehensive ``primitive equations'' approach to the modeling, which is complementary to the GEM modular approach. QMPP will be driven directly by the upstream solar wind data from WIND or ACE, and will physically couple all regions of near Earth space.