Bob Weigel

Associate Professor, Atmospheric Physics
Director, Space Weather Lab
Graduate Coordinator, CSI PhD Program

Email: rweigel@gmu.edu

Website: BobWeigel.spacs.gmu.edul
Office: 360 Research Hall  Fairfax, Va. 22030
Phone: 703.993.1361 Fax: 703.993.9300

Current Research Interests

My research involves two broad areas: Space Weather (or Space Plasma Physics) and Data Sciences. My research interests include magnetospheric physics and geomagnetism, solar wind/magnetosphere/ionosphere coupling, inverse methods for magnetospheric modeling, nonlinear dynamics, decision theory applied to rare event forecasting, scientific visualization, and large-scale time series databases.
In the area of Space Weather, I study how Earth’s magnetic field interacts with the solar wind.  The solar wind is a fully ionized plasma that is constantly flowing out of the sun.  The solar wind causes a wide variety of electrical and magnetic phenomenon above Earth’s atmosphere, the most widely known of which is the aurora.  This region above the atmosphere is called the magnetosphere; it extends to approximately the Moon’s orbit and encompases the orbit of many satellites used for telecommunications.

In the area of the Data Sciences, I work on many applied problems involving the visualization, management, and analysis of massive streams of data containing information about the solar wind and plasma in Earth’s magnetosphere.

Teaching

Graduate
CSI 769: Magnetospheric …