Angelica M. Castillo Tibocha

ST Solar-Terrestrial Sciences

The 2022 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to Angelica M. Castillo Tibocha for the poster/PICO entitled:

Reconstructing the dynamics of the outer electron radiation belt by means of the standard and ensemble Kalman filter with the VERB-3D code (Castillo, A. M.; De Wiljes, J.; Shprits, Y. Y.; Aseev, N. A.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Angelica M. Castillo is a Ph.D. candidate at the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) and affiliated to the Physics department of the University Potsdam in Germany. The main focus of her research is the application and development of data assimilation tools for the field of Space Weather. Data assimilation techniques allow us to blend satellite observations and physics-based models in a statistically optimal manner. Thus, the optimal state of a dynamic system can be reconstructed, accurate forecasts can be estimated, and knowledge about missing processes in the physics-based model can be gained through comparison between the theoretical state estimate and the data assimilative state.

The presented work introduces the implementation of a disturbed Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) for the reconstruction of the radiation belts electron population. The study assess the convergence of the EnKF solution to the standard Kalman filter (KF) state estimate by means of a synthetic experiment. Furthermore, two new 3D-EnKF approaches for electron phase space density are tested using real satellite observations and validated against a 3D split-operator KF. These efficient data assimilation tools deliver accurate approximations of the KF solution and are suitable for real-time forecasting.