A lifetime with models, or toils and thrills of number crunching

Abstract

Modeling the magnetosphere from satellite data has some analogy to the construction of a person’s ‘identikit’ from patchy information, collected by different people at different times under different lighting/viewing conditions. This article is a brief overview of the author’s half-century-long efforts in building Earth’s magnetosphere models, with some feats, setbacks, and lessons learned.