Quantitative Modeling of Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling Processes

Abstract

This paper reviews the topical conference named above, which was held in Kyoto, March 9-13, 1987. With a well organized program of excellent papers, the symposium celebrated a right of passage in the life of our discipline. After growing in stages from a largely qualitative discipline divided into distinct, mostly non-communicating compartments, the field enters the fourth decade of the space age a largely quantitative, communicating, integrated discipline. The aspect most indicating achieved maturity is the shared view that the solar wind-magnetosphere-ionosphere system is an interactively coupled unit, which might be called the geospace system, whose properties must be determine through discipline-wide cooperative research. In the area of theory, the geospace system's great complexity and the drive to understand it quantitatively put great emphasis on solving the global coupling, dynamics and mapping problems and building numerical models of increasing comprehensiveness and predictive power. In the area of observations, the corresponding emphasis is on coordinated campaigns and computerized data management, analyses and displays. Acknowledging the historical imperative of the time, the symposium assembled top people to relate progress toward quantitative empirical and theoretical understanding of all areas of the geospace system. The resulting global view of the state of our science shows great strength throughout, with areas of rapid progress and areas of difficult progress, but motion on all fronts. Under the pull of a common goal to achieve a fully predictive science of the geospace environment, we see the separate motions converging.