Overview of UPS-IRAP Node

Location (town, country): Toulouse, France

Web site: http://transplanet.irap.omp.eu/

Description of the infrastructure:

The Centre de Données de la Physique des Plasma (CDPP, Plasma Physics Data Centre, http://cdpp.eu/) is a data centre for space plasma data that is operated jointly by CNRS and Centre National d’ Etude Spatiale (CNES). CDPP maintains a large and steadily growing database and provides access to some external databases through interoperable services. CDPP is also in charge of developing several web tools (e.g. AMDA, 3DView). Transplanet is an online tool developed by CNRS/IRAP/CDPP for the Planetary Space Weather Services of the Europlanet 2020 Research Infrastructure. At the end of the Europlanet project, Transplanet will be maintained by CDPP. Transplanet has been put online in 2017 and about 30 runs are requested every year.

Services currently offered by the infrastructure:

Currently, the Transplanet web site allows run-on-request of the planet-independent version of the IPIM model. It is then possible to run the model for the main planets of the solar system (Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and in the near-future Saturn). The service provides a complete set of parameters characterizing these environments, including the concentration, velocities, temperatures, production rates of the different ions and electron heating rates. It is based on a modular approach allowing for selection of species, date of simulation and location. It is intended to be a support tool to data processing and analysis. The output format has been chosen to ease the interface with external data processing or vizualization tools, including online services (e.g. AMDA/CDPP). This web service is an open service which aims at providing users with the most relevant and consistent description of the couplings in planetary space environments and it will evolve in a way to increase user control on the simulation through a simplified Human-machine interface (HMI).

New areas opening to users:

The current version of Transplanet only allows for energy degradation from photoionization, though the kinetic module can account for electron precipitation. We will quickly give the possibility to the user to use magnetospheric inputs for the terrestrial version of the model by adding OVATION precipitation model. We will also extent the capacity of the model by adding the possibility to upload a user defined precipitation flux in the simulation. Electrodynamics couplings are important in the Earth case, so we will unbridle plasma transport due to convection by allowing for convection models obtained from SuperDARN convection maps.