Predicting variations in the near-Earth space environment that can lead to spacecraft damage and failure is one example of "space weather" and a big space physics challenge. A project recently funded through the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program aims at developing a new capability to understand, model, and predict Space Hazards Induced near Earth by Large Dynamic Storms, the SHIELDS framework. The project goals are to understand the dynamics of the surface charging environment (SCE), the hot (keV) electrons representing the source and seed populations for the radiation belts, on both macro-and micro-scale. Important physics questions related to particle injection and acceleration associated with magnetospheric storms and substorms, as well as plasma waves, are investigated. These challenging problems are addressed using a team of world-class experts in the fields of space science and computational plasma physics, and state-of-the-art models and computational facilities.

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In 2018, we introduced a broadband interferometric mapping and polarization observation system (BIMAP) to study the detailed physics of lightning discharge processes (Shao et al., 2018(Shao et al., , 2020). The BIMAP system consists of three sets of spatially separated broadband RF (20-80 MHz) antennas to map the lightning sources in 2D angular space as a typical broadband lightning interferometer (e.g.,

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