Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Prediction of solar storms has become a very important issue due to the fact that they can affect dramatically the telecommunication and electrical power systems in the earth. As a result, a lot of research is being doing in this direction, space weather forecast. Magneto-Hydrodynamics systems are being studied in order to analyze the space plasma dynamics, and techniques which have been broadly used in prediction of earth environmental variables like the Kalman filter (KF), the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF), the extended Kalman filter (EKF), etc., are being studied and adapted to this new framework. The assimilation of a wide range of space environment data into first-principles based global numerical models will improve our understanding of the physics of the geospace environment and the forecasting of its behaviour. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to study the performance of nonlinear observers in Magneto-Hidrodynamics systems, namely, the EnKF. The EnKF is based on a Monte Carlo simulation approach for propagation of process and measurement errors. In this paper, the EnKF for a nonlinear two-dimensional magneto-hydrodynamic (2D-MHD) system is considered. For its implementation, two software packages are merged, namely, the Versatile Advection Code (VAC) written in Fortran and Matlab of Mathworks. The 2D-MHD is simulated with the VAC code while the EnKF is computed in Matlab. In order to study the performance of the EnKF in MHD systems, different number of measurement points as well as ensemble members are set.