Including thermospheric processes in the Met Office Unified Model for weather and climate

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Space weather includes all of the matter and radiation that is emitted by the sun, and interacts with the Earth's atmosphere. Major space weather events such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections can significantly harm technology on Earth, for example by damaging satellites, causing power grid failures, or disrupting radio communications. The increasing reliance upon technology that is vulnerable to space weather means that the risk they pose is higher than ever before.The Met Office aims to develop their Unified Model in order to simulate, predict and mitigate the effects of space weather. The Unified Model is a computer model of the atmosphere that simulates the Earth's weather and climate, and is used for producing weather forecasts and climate predictions. It currently simulates the atmosphere up to altitudes of 100km. The aim of this project is to modify the UM's `dynamical core', the model component that takes care of the large-scale atmospheric fluid dynamics, so that it can make stable simulations of the atmosphere to higher altitudes, perhaps as high as 600km. This will be achieved by including new physical processes that aren't currently included in the UM, and by implementing a sophisticated new numerical method, developed under the applicant's Ph.D. project, to solve the resulting equations. Extending the dynamical core in this way is a critical pre-requisite for further development of the UM into state of the art tool for space weather forecasting and for research into the effects of space weather on climate.