Shinichi Ohtani
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Earth & Environmental Science
Geomagnetic storms are the most intense disturbances in the space around Earth. They are a central concern of space weather, the study of events in space that can disrupt satellites, GPS, power grids and even expose aircraft and space crews to radiation.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
Astronomy & Astrophysics
- Topics
space weather
geomagnetic storms
magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Identify the internal and external conditions under which the dawnside wedge current system appears during geomagnetic storms, using SuperMAG-selected events and probability distributions of solar wind and magnetospheric parameters.
- Characterize the size, timing and preconditioning of the dawnside auroral electrojet enhancement, using polar maps of ground magnetic disturbances and auroral images.
- Test whether the dawnside current system is a dawn-skewed substorm current wedge or is driven by enhanced dawnside conductance under strong convection, using near-Earth magnetic field, energetic particle and plasma sheet convection measurements.
More about the research
During storms, electric currents in the ionosphere, the charged upper layer of the atmosphere, grow much stronger. Severe storms can push these currents south over the northern continental United States, where they threaten power networks. This project focuses on a storm-time current system near dawn, the local time sector where ground magnetic disturbances are very often the largest.
Why it matters
Storm-time currents that reach mid-latitudes threaten power grids, satellite operations and GPS. By explaining how the dawnside current system forms, this work could help build models that forecast hazardous space weather. Such forecasts could benefit power grid operators, satellite operators and others who depend on these technologies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Shasha Zou
University of Michigan, MI·Physics
Track how the global ionospheric total electron content (TEC) changes over time during solar flares, using TEC data from worldwide GNSS satellite-navigation receivers paired with solar radiation from the FISM2 model or SDO EVE observations.
Grant Stephens
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Physics
Release the first combined storm-substorm empirical model of Earth's magnetospheric magnetic field, together with its machine learning data mining algorithms, as open-source software in modern programming languages.
Xian Lu
Clemson University, SC·Physics
Determine the role of Alfvén waves in producing auroral arcs, compared with steady particle precipitation, using midnight short-wave infrared all-sky imaging combined with photometers, imagers and the PFISR radar at Poker Flat.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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