Christos Katsavrias

The H2020 SafeSpace project aims at the implementation of a space weather safety prototype, in particular to predict the deep charging hazard. The proposed service is built on a Sun‐to‐Earth chain of physical codes that propagates physical information and uncertainties in order to model the outer radiation belt dynamics. In this paper, we present the inner magnetosphere section of the SafeSpace pipeline that relies on solar wind driven and hourly updated models that describe the trapped electron environment (VLF waves, cold plasma and seed population densities), as well as the physical processes to which the trapped electrons are subjected to, such as radial diffusion and wave particle interactions. Then, this physical configuration is poured into the Salammbô‐EnKF model, a data assimilation radiation belt model which provides a global forecast of the densities across the radiation belts. We have compared the forecasting performance of this new modeling pipeline to a reference model during the St. Patrick's Day storm in 2015. We show that the new SafeSpace implementation shows closer results to the observations in addition to a better forecast within the prediction horizon.

In this paper, we present a new method to compute rapidly, wave particle interaction induced pitch angle and momentum diffusion coefficients. Those terms are normally obtained by the numerical solving of equations based on the quasi‐linear theory. However, this bulk resolution leads to a high computational cost, preventing the integration of plasma density and VLF waves nowcasts and forecasts. Therefore, and in the context of the SAFESPACE project (H2020), we implemented a new wave particle interaction code called FARWEST (FAst Radiation diffusion with Waves ESTimator), with an efficient interpolation based method. The proposed implementation was validated against reference results obtained by WAPI, ONERA's wave particle interaction legacy code, with a substantial reduction of the computing time while conserving the physical accuracy of the generated coefficients. The FARWEST code is later used to measure the impact of a time‐dependent plasma density distribution (numerically computed by BIRA's plasmaspheric model SPM) on the coefficients and on the representation of the electron flux map by Salammbô, ONERA's radiation belt code.