Storms from the Sun The Emerging Science of Space Weather (2002) / Chapter Skim
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11. The Forecast
11. The Forecast
Pages 171-190
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From page 171... ...
They pore over mathematical wiggles ant! line plots, spacecraft images of the Sun ant!
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From page 172... ...
Atmospheric Aciministration's (NOAA) Space Environment Center (SEC)
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From page 173... ...
his fellow SEC forecasters to warn them of incoming storms from the Sun. The job of space weather forecaster is comparable to the work of the forecasters at NOAA's National Weather Service, according to Ernie Hilciner, director of the Space Environment Center.
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From page 174... ...
, the forecasters and scien tists cannot say with much certainty when a solar storm will or won't cross paths with Earth. They can only guess at the direction and trajectory of a storm until it actually washes over ACE, NASA's spacecraft monitoring the solar wind from a position 1 million miles out in front of Earth.
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have a margin of error if the magnetic storm proclucec! strong geomagnetically induced currents.
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instruments in support of clozens of incliviclual satellite missions, including the Interplanetary Monitoring Platforms, the Solar Maximum Mission, the Dynamics Explorers, Hellos, ant! the International Sun-Earth Explorers.
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Late in 1995, the European Space Agency (ESA)
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from laboratories arounc! the woricI, the ISTP team was meeting to share past observations of coronal mass ejections (CMEs)
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. 1nltlatlng a magnetic storm anc pumping up t" ye energy In t" ye radiation belts.
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observations from solar telescopes had been coupled with solar wind measurements; the information about the solar wind was compared with the effects measured in Earth's auroral zones, radiation belts, and magnetic tail. ISTP investigators had made the first complete, real-time study of a space weather event at a pace that Richard Carrington and Elias Loomis could have only i89 dreamed about when they observed the great flare and aurora of 1859.
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From page 181... ...
measurementsin the manner of atmospheric scientists who stucly global change through thousands of weather stations space scientists are now cireaming about a clay when they can make "weather maps" of approaching storms from the Sun. They are also vastly improving the moclels of space weather disturbances from solar outburst to impact on Earth's atmosphere.
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From page 182... ...
take a supercomputer one hour to simulate one hour of time. So various groups began to experiment with using real solar wind observations from spacecraft like Wincl and ACE to drive their moclels, insteac!
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"Most of the moclels aireacly in use today do a reasonable job of predicting average conclitions, but few of them take into account the dynamics and how quickly the system can change," says Terry Onsager, a researcher at the Space Environment Center who works to turn basic research finclings into tools that forecasters can use. "But with the new stream of real-time measurements, we are beginning to synthesize mature moclels in orcler to give industry ant!
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From page 184... ...
Starting on July 11, 2000, forecasters at the Space Environment Center and scientists at ISTP mission control at NASA Goddard began closely watching solar active region 9077, a large group of sunspots with a complicated, gnarled structure. For four days they tracked a series of large flares and coronal mass ejections erupting from the region as it slowly lined up in the center of the solar disk for a head-on shot at Earth.
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By late afternoon on July 15, the largest magnetic storm since March 1989 began distorting the atmosphere arounc! Earth, with a storm that reacher!
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Auroras would have been visible across the entire continental United States had the storm occurred after dark. Courtesy of Visible Imaging System/University of Iowa and NASA.
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beams of ultraviolet light propagating through the solar wincI, researchers have begun to create images and moclels of the far side of the Sun, provicling hope of space weather predictions macle weeks in advance, rather than clays. Combining auroral imagery with particle ant!
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"Within the research community, there has been continuous progress in Outlying ant! modeling the space environment," says Terry Onsager.
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So as a practical matter, space weather forecasting is currently tier! to the uncertain life of research satellites ant!
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From page 190... ...
It is like peeling the proverbial onion: peeling any layer away reveals another one just as complex and compelling. "Simply watching the never-ending procession of changes on the Sun in full-resolution movies still takes my breath away, even after five years of it," says foe Gurman, NASA's project scientist for the SOHO mission.
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