Massimo Materassi — Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Istituto dei Sistemi complessi CNR-ISC #
Huge room for Statistical Physics in the Ionospheric Physics and Space Weather #
Since its discovery, the Earth’s ionosphere has been treated in many different ways: initially, it was described rather roughly as a channel to communicate through electromagnetic waves with receivers beyond the horizon, due to its capacity of reflecting the signals. However, being a highly variable physical system, in the users’ mind the ionosphere has been viewed more often as a complication than as a tool: its variability was always seen as an annoying characteristic, and it is still regarded this way by a wide community of communication and positioning “users”. The highly variable ionosphere, however, is much more than an annoying detail disturbing the GPS technology, or the scarcely reliable channel for ground-to-ground communication: since some decades, physical aspects of the system gained importance in the scientific and users’ community. As physical models of the ionospheric dynamics grew more and more important, multi-disciplinary aspects of physics and mathematics became central: from plasma dynamics, to electromagnetics in random media; from photochemistry kinetic equations, to the kinetic theory of gases of many species; from turbulence theory, to forced criticality. In this short review, I will try to sketch some aspects under which the state-of-the-art of ionospheric physics and modelling, with its paramount role in Space Weather science, appears to be a scenario with serious opportunities of intervention for the Statistical Mechanics and Dynamical System community, with their unique expertise in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, stochastic theories, dissipative structures and the predictability assessment of chaotic systems.