Improving Understanding and Assessment of the Ambient Solar Wind

The ambient solar wind flows and fields influence the dynamics of coronal mass ejections in space and are of pivotal importance in shaping Earth's space weather environment.

An important objective is to develop, implement, and optimize numerical models for specifying the large-scale properties of the solar wind at the inner boundary of heliospheric codes. In this talk, I will present a new prediction system that fuses in situ measurements into numerical models to better match solar wind solutions with the prevailing conditions at Earth. I will demonstrate that the proposed prediction system improves several solar wind models by up to twenty percent in terms of established measures. I will discuss why this is the case, and demonstrate that our findings have important implications for future practice in space weather research and prediction.