Our Space Weather Forecasts Are About to Get Better

The United Kingdom’s national weather service has added space weather to its catalogue of forecasting services. While space may be very far away, its weather has some significant consequences for the terrestrial plane.

Teaming with several US agencies, including NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has its own space weather center, the UK’s Met Office hopes to produce near real-time forecasts of solar flares, coronal mass ejections (CMEs), and solar wind. It has been using the open source MongoDB database to efficiently manage and analyze information.

When the plan for collaborative effort was announced a year ago, a joint statement was issued on behalf of the collaborating organizations in the US and the UK. The statement underlined the seriousness of space weather, saying, “We recognize space weather as a significant natural hazard risk with economic and societal impacts on key infrastructures and technologies, including our power grids, location and timing systems, aviation operation, and security of satellites.”

As the statement mentions, the ways in which space phenomena can affect humanity are numerous. Geomagnetic storms started by solar winds can temporary knock out electrical grids. As satellites have become smaller, they have also become more susceptible to solar particles, which can disturb their electrical innards. Communications technologies, such as radio signals and radar, can fail when the ionosphere faces solar disruptions.

It sounds like the Met Office’s predictions won’t be immediately available to the masses, but will eventually be released to businesses and agencies whose operations could be disturbed by unexpected space activity.

None of this would have been a concern in centuries before when technology was not so ubiquitous (although in 1859, telegraph service was interrupted by a space weather tantrum now known as the Carrington event). But now that we all have phone bricks in our pockets and probably wouldn’t be able to navigate our way out of a cul de sac without our GPS, it’s worth keeping an eye on solar flares and other spacey phenomena.

More on space weather:

Spaced Out: 'The Space Composer' is Making Music With the Sun

Businesses Better Be Ready for Nasty Space Weather