Providing knowledge of the satellite-killer electrons in near-Earth space using a near real-time data driven space weather model based on ULF-wave radial diffusion.
Background
Figure 1 illustrates how large scale variations in the flux of relativistic electrons in the outer radiation belt can be accurately simulated by solving the radial diffusion equation
Here, 
represents the phase space density (PSD) of the electrons, 
is the McIlwain parameter, 
is the electron life-time, given empirically as a function of Kp (=3/Kp in days) and 
is the radial diffusion coefficient, (Shprits et al. 2005). The outer boundary condition for the results shown in Figure 1 has been taken from a measurement of the electron flux at L=7 and the top two panels illustrate how the evolution of this flux by radial diffusion has the same large scale features as the flux measured by the CRRES satellite (see Shprits et al. (2005) for more details).
The greatest difficulty in modelling the ULF driven radial diffusion of radiation belt electrons is to accurately determine the diffusion coefficient, , due to both the wave magnetic field 
and the wave electric field 
where
(see Brizzard and Chan, 2004). Here, 
, represents the magnetic field at the Earth’s surface and 
is the Earths radius. 
, 
and 
are the electrons charge, first adiabatic invariant, and the relativistic correction factor. The parameters 
and 
are the magnetic and electric field power spectral densities in the magnetospheric equatorial plane evaluated at frequencies, 
, which satisfied the drift-resonance condition
where m is the azimuthal wavenumber and 
is the azimuthal drift speed of the electron. In order to directly determine the parameters and would require simultaneous global measurements of the waves electric and magnetic fields in space.