Space Weather

(Picture Essay of the Day)

“The forecast for the next 2 years or so calls for steadily increasing barrages of solar radiation.”

While that grim prognostication may not yet be covered alongside the warnings issued for the more pedestrian snow storms and rain showers that we all plan our lives around, that could change.Though we’re protected from the interplay between the solar wind and the solar magnetic field space weather by Earth’s atmosphere and magnetosphere, some of our technology is more sensitive. Satellites, space shuttles, and the electrical grid are all subject to the powerful forces of this phenomenon.

But fear not for your ability to view celebrity rooftops via Google Earth. Their predictions might not get much play in the banter of the local weather report, but the scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) are closely monitoring the situation.

The flux of charged particles mainly protons and electrons streaming from the sun’s volatile corona varies according to the 11-year solar cycle, a steady pattern of  increases and decreases in solar activity. This mass of particles, along with the magnetic field that it generates, envelops Earth and extends far past it into space. Earth’s magnetosphere is stretched into a comet-like tail by the force. At the solar maximum, the several-year period at the end of a cycle, flares and coronal mass ejections eruptions of magnetized plasma become more frequent. The latter causes geomagnetic storms when the plasma encounters Earth’s upper atmosphere.

By recording the patterns of the various solar events, the scientists at SWPC are able, to some extent, to forecast space weather and alert satellite owners and electrical companies that trouble is coming. Satellites, which can suffer fried circuitry and disrupted orbits, may be shifted out of the way of oncoming radiation or data may be withheld until the event passes. NASA is developing a ’solar shield,’ a program to predict weaknesses in the electrical grid, which may be damaged severely by the entrance of additional current to the system. (Were a storm of the severity of the Carrington event to occur again, the effect on the grid would likely be catastrophic, as even smaller geomagnetic storms have caused electrical failures.)

The approach of the next solar maximum in 2013 underscores the necessity of refining these technologies.

Despite the fact that its scale and effects are enormous, space weather is largely invisible to most of us unless we live at the northern or southern reaches of the world, where the interaction of the charged particles of the solar wind and Earth’s magnetosphere manifest as the auroras borealis and australis: the northern and southern lights. Caused by the collision of the charged particles of the solar wind with the upper atmosphere, these displays are most frequent at the poles because that is where the lines of Earth’s geomagnetic field originate. However, during particularly strong events, the auroras may be witnessed at higher or lower latitudes.