Dynamic Radiation Environment Assimilation Model: DREAM

The Dynamic Radiation Environment Assimilation Model (DREAM) was developed to provide accurate, global specification of the Earth's radiation belts and to better understand the physical processes that control radiation belt structure and dynamics. DREAM is designed using a modular software approach in order to provide a computational framework that makes it easy to change components such as the global magnetic field model, radiation belt dynamics model, boundary conditions, etc. This paper provides a broad overview of the DREAM model and a summary of some of the principal results to date. We describe the structure of the DREAM model, describe the five major components, and illustrate the various options that are available for each component. We discuss how the data assimilation is performed and the data preprocessing and postprocessing that are required for producing the final DREAM outputs. We describe how we apply global magnetic field models for conversion between flux and phase space density and, in particular, the benefits of using a self‐consistent, coupled ring current–magnetic field model. We discuss some of the results from DREAM including testing of boundary condition assumptions and effects of adding a source term to radial diffusion models. We also describe some of the testing and validation of DREAM and prospects for future development. Key Points This is the first paper to describe, in detail, the DREAM model We describe how DREAM applies data assimilation to radiation belt modeling We present several interesting results from running the model