The Kristian Birkeland Medal 2018

Professor Tamas Gombosi

Professor Gombosi is a leader in space weather and planetary research, a visionary in Space Weather numerical modeling, and a pioneer of cometary plasma physics. Professor Gombosi was born and raised in Hungary. He earned his PhD in physics at the Roland Eötvös University in Budapest and joined the Central Research Institute for Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Next,he went to Moscow where he was mentored by such giants of Soviet space science as Roald Sagdeev, Pavel Elyasberg, Albert Galeev, Konstantin Gringauz, and Vitaliy Shapiro. At the end of 1983 Professor Gombosi moved to the University of Michigan in the United States, where he is the Rollin M. Gerstacker Professor of Engineering and the Konstantin Gringauz Distinguished University Professor of Space Science.

Since the mid 1990s Professor Gombosi has devoted much of his energy to initiating and leading a highly successful effort to develop the first generation of highperformance, physics- based, predictive models of the Sun-Earth space environment. He has led an interdisciplinary team that developed the first solution adaptive global magnetohydrodynamic model of space plasmas. This model has become the dominant workhorse for Space Weather simulations at the Community Coordinated Modeling Center.

Professor Gombosi also led his team to the creation of the BATS-R-US grid-adaptive extended magnetohydrodynamic model, a powerful and versatile numerical tool used to model the global geospace environment, the heliosphere, the solar interior and planetary magnetospheres, allowing for a smoothly unified simulation of the entire Sun to Earth space system.

Subsequently, Professor Gombosi's group developed the Space Weather Modeling Framework, a powerful computational tool that enables the space physics community to couple together a chain of models and describe the complex Sun-Earth system. This tool has been recently transitioned to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center and started operational Space Weather forecasting on October 1, 2016. The computational methods and simulation tools developed under the leadership of Professor Gombosi revolutionized the modeling of our space environment, put his group at the University of Michigan at the forefront of Space Weather research, and provided a vital contribution towards forecasting and mitigating the adverse Space Weather effects on technology and society.