Robert Rutledge - On Monitoring Space Weather


0:00	Solar activity overall follows a cycle of about an eleven year pattern, so where we
0:04	have periods of very high activity with lots of sunspots and then periods of almost no
0:09	activity and no space weather. Right now we’re just coming out of a prolonged solar minimum.
0:14	We really haven’t had much for significant activity since something like December 2006.
0:18	We started to get the first signs that the sun is waking up, and we’ve had some significant
0:23	events lately; as this continues we’ll climb up to solar maximum, the peak in activity
0:29	around mid-2013. Space weather plays out on a number of different time scales. The first
0:35	piece, the solar flare piece, is really instant. When we’re measuring it with our geosynchronous
0:39	space craft it’s here, it’s affecting the earth. The next piece that comes with
0:42	that is the radiation storm piece, so energetic particles impinging on satellites or astronauts
0:46	in space. That can come in tens of minutes. The last piece is the piece associated with
0:51	the coronal mass ejection, a large part of the atmosphere being blown off the sun at
0:55	really fantastic speeds. Coronal mass ejections is one part of space that gets a lot of attention;
1:01	that’s where a cloud of mass, billions of tons, is being ejected from the sun and is
1:05	coming towards earth. This can come off from anywhere from one to five million miles an
1:09	hour making that ninety three million mile trip in anywhere from seventeen, eighteen
1:12	hours in the fastest cases, up to several days. These are huge, huge eruptions. So if
1:17	you see the whole heliosphere, you could see that it’s affecting a third or a quarter
1:21	or even approaching a half of the heliosphere. We’re constantly pushing the bounds of how
1:26	well we can model and predict space weather. There’s a lot going on in academia. We’ve
1:30	done a good job of getting models now into operation that describe, “when will a CME,
1:36	that large cloud of gas that gets ejected from the sun and affects the earth, when will
1:40	it get here, how will it hit us.” The range of customers for space weather products is
1:43	really quite varied. We have a flare piece, that electromagnetic piece that affects the
1:48	sunlit side of the earth, and that’s important to HF communication users. If you’ve flown
1:53	on an aircraft across the Atlantic or the Pacific chances are that information was being
1:58	relayed to that aircraft through the use of HF communication. We also have a range of
2:02	customers in the satellite arena, so radiation can be created in these storms, where charged
2:08	particles have the energy to pass through satellites. That can cause the memory in those
2:12	satellites to become corrupted. Satellite providers have to be very careful not to upload
2:17	a critical set of instructions, try to load new software or try to do complicated maneuvers
2:21	because they can be corrupted, even leading to the loss of that asset. The same is true
2:26	for our partners at NASA with the humans in space. These same charged particles can pass
2:31	through humans causing biological damage. CME’s can cause very large geomagnetic storms.
2:37	The most important customers for that are people in the electrical generation industries,
2:42	people that are generating the power and responsible for transmitting it around the country. Those
2:46	storms can cause large currents to be induced in their systems causing heating and even
2:51	damage. If we can give them an advance notice to say, tomorrow, we’re going to have a
2:56	big solar storm, they’ll do everything they can to put themselves in a robust posture.
3:01	If they have three high-voltage lines that they use to transfer power from one part of
3:06	the country to another, say they’ve taken one out for maintenance, they’ll go ahead
3:09	and put that third one back in service just to give them a little more margin to be able
3:12	to absorb the solar disturbance.