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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, November 30, 2015 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Antti Pulkkinen

"Magnetic Storms and the Electric Power Grid"

ABSTRACT -- Geomagnetically induced currents (GIC) flowing in long manmade conductor systems have become one of the main space weather concerns. The potential for widespread problems in operating high-voltage power transmission systems during major geomagnetic storms has prompted increasing federal regulatory, science, industry and public interest in the problem. The impact caused by extreme storm events has been of special interest and consequently much of the recent GIC research has been focused on defining extreme GIC event scenarios and quantifying the corresponding transmission system response. In addition, there is an elevated need for developing next generation GIC prediction products for the power industry.

In this presentation, I will discuss the key scientific concepts pertaining to GIC and provide a brief review of the recent progress in developing extreme storm scenarios and new predictive techniques. Much of the recent progress in understanding GIC and its impact on power grids has resulted from improved scientific community-power industry interactions. The common language and information exchange interfaces established between the two communities have led to significant progress in transitioning scientific knowledge into detailed impacts analyses. I will provide a few personal reflections on the interactions with the power industry. We also face a number of future challenges in specifying GIC, for example, in terms of more realistic modeling of the three-dimensional geomagnetic induction process. I will discuss briefly some of these future challenges.

SPEAKER -- Dr Antti Pulkkinen is currently Director of Space Weather Research Center (SWRC) operated at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Dr Pulkkinen received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Helsinki, Finland in 2003. Subsequently he joined the nonlinear dynamics group at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) to carry out his postdoctoral research 2004-2006. Dr Pulkkinen's PhD and postdoctoral research involved studies on both ground effects of space weather and complex nonlinear dynamics of the magnetosphere-ionosphere system. 2011-2013 Dr Pulkkinen worked as an Associate Director of Institute for Astrophysics and Computational Sciences and as an Associate Professor at The Catholic University of America (CUA). At CUA Dr Pulkkinen launched a new Space Sciences and Space Weather program crafted to educate the next generation space weather scientists and operators.

Dr Pulkkinen has been leading numerous space weather-related projects where scientists have worked in close collaboration with end-users. In many of these projects his work has involved general empirical and first-principles modeling of space weather and investigations of effects on manmade systems in space and on the ground. Dr Pulkkinen was awarded NASA Exceptional Achievement Award 2015 for his efforts to address the space weather effects on power grids. Recently Dr Pulkkinen has been leading the development of space weather forecasting activity at NASA GSFC. The new SWRC activity provides space weather services to NASA's robotic missions.




Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov