Getting Ready for the Big One: 10,000 Year Solar Storm A $2.6 Trillion Event, FEMA Adds Space Weather To Daily Briefings
Two main types of explosions occur on the sun: solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Unlike the energy and x-rays produced in a solar flare – which can reach Earth at the speed of light in eight minutes – coronal mass ejections are giant clouds of solar material that take one to three days to reach Earth. Once at Earth, these ejections, also called CMEs, can impact satellites in space or interfere with radio communications by generating geomagnetic storms
But it is a scenario that space scientists, global insurance corporations and government agencies from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to NASA to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) take seriously, calling it a “low probability but high-impact event” that merits a substantial push on several fronts: research, forecasting and mitigation strategy.
Image Credit: NASA
At a recent conference in Washington, D.C. that drew space weather specialists from academia, the federal government, the military and private industry, Louis Lanzerotti, distinguished research professor at NJIT’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research, summed up the implications of a massive, well-timed solar storm for today’s technology-based, hyper-connected global society:
“Since the development of the electrical telegraph in the 1840s, space weather processes have affected the design, implementation and operation of many engineered systems, at first on Earth and now in space,” noted Lanzerotti, a panelist at the conference. “As the complexity of such systems increases, as new technologies are invented and deployed, and as humans have ventured beyond Earth’s surface, both human-built systems and humans themselves become more susceptible to the effects of Earth’s space environment.”
In addition to disrupting communications and energy grids, what is broadly known as space weather – powerful bursts of electromagnetic radiation, energetic charged particles and magnetized plasma – has the potential to corrode water and sewer pipelines, to erase historical data stored in computer memory, to undermine military and security operations and to harm astronauts traveling in space.
The symposium, “Space Weather Science and Applications: Research for Today, Training for Tomorrow,” sponsored by the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, focused on the growing urgency for both basic scientific research and the development of practical applications in the field.
Trillion Dollar Recovery
In a 2013 report, Lloyd’s of London, the insurance market, put the population at risk of a massive storm at “between 20-40 million with durations up to 1-2 years,” depending “largely on the availability of spare replacement transformers.” The cost of such a recovery would range between $600 billion and $2.6 trillion.
The symposium followed on the heels of a conference late last year, “Space Weather: Understanding Potential Impacts and Building Resilience,” convened in Washington, D.C. under the auspices of the Executive Office of the President of the United States and also attended by scientists and engineers from academia and industry, as well as policymakers and elected officials. At that time, the OSTP laid out a multi-part action plan to address, as Lanzerotti put it, “civil societal issues related to all aspects of space weather.”
These areas are the focus of NJIT’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research, which has a variety of instruments in space and on the ground for observing and recording space weather, including the world’s largest solar optical telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory, a solar radio telescope array in Owens Valley, instruments across Antarctica and aboard spacecraft in the Van Allen radiation belts.
At the recent symposium, Tamara Dickinson, the principal assistant director for environment and energy at the OSTP, described recent minor storms that had caused disruption: a blackout in Sweden during which NASA also detected anomalies in deep space missions and several years later, the interruption of flight-control systems, again in Sweden, that halted air traffic.
Setting Benchmarks to Assess Risks to Critical Infrastructure
Dickinson said the government is “at a “fundamental turning point” in its approach to space weather planning and prepared to “take decisive action to address this risk.”
Ralph Stoffler, the director of weather, deputy chief of staff for operations at U.S. Air Force headquarters in Washington, said the Air Force was currently expanding its network of sensors to monitor space weather, including placing them on all of its satellites.
“We need data to support particular military operations,” Stoffler said, adding that the Air Force relies on GPS for missions such as piloting remote aircraft in Afghanistan from the U.S. “If we can predict space weather, we can have other operations in place or delay.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has recently added space weather to its daily operations briefings. “We know there is a gap in our ability to assess vulnerability and consequences,” said Jack Anderson, a senior analyst at DHS’s National Protection and Programs Directorate, adding that while there is currently no scale for predicting the magnitude of a storm as exists for hurricanes, for example, “we need to develop that at FEMA.”
William Lapenta, director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said his agency’s goal was to track solar storms “from sun to mud,” to predict where conditions following a coronal mass ejection, for example, would be most intense in the ionosphere and on Earth in the form of underground electrical currents, and to calculate impacts on a variety of systems.
Credits: NASA/IRIS/SDO/Goddard Space Flight Center
One of the near-term challenges for policymakers will be to set benchmarks for assessing the vulnerability of various technology systems and establishing thresholds that would trigger protective or recovery responses, said William Murtagh, the assistant director for the space weather, energy and environment division at the OSTP. There are currently working groups focused on these benchmark amid efforts to reach out to other countries to establish international protocols for aviation conditions, mitigation strategies and data sharing, among other areas.
“We do not fully understand those upper boundaries, but we need to … once we understand how big these storms are we can develop trigger points,” he said, adding that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was interested in the “10,000-year storm – that’s what they need to know.”
“The technological and biological impacts of severe space weather events are now firmly in the federal government’s sights,” noted Andrew Gerrard, director of NJIT’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research. “All things being equal, increased research funding from the represented federal agencies will further bolster the incorporation of ‘space weather’ into our daily lives. Such development will enable the solar-terrestrial community to, for the first time, see a solar storm, track its approach, and prepare accordingly.”
Space weather models combined with real time observations help scientists track CMEs. These images were produced from a model known as ENLIL named after the Sumerian storm god. It shows the journey of a CME on March 5, 2013, as it moved toward Mars.
Credits: NASA/Goddard/SWRC/CCMC
Even the biggest solar flares are not powerful enough to physically destroy Earth.
This is not to say that space weather can’t affect our planet. The explosive heat of a solar flare can’t make it all the way to our globe, but electromagnetic radiation and energetic particles certainly can. Solar flares can temporarily alter the upper atmosphere creating disruptions with signal transmission from, say, a GPS satellite to Earth causing it to be off by many yards. Another phenomenon produced by the sun could be even more disruptive. Known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), these solar explosions propel bursts of particles and electromagnetic fluctuations into Earth’s atmosphere. Those fluctuations could induce electric fluctuations at ground level that could blow out transformers in power grids. The CME’s particles can also collide with crucial electronics onboard a satellite and disrupt its systems.
This movie shows a massive solar flare from October 2003, captured by the SOHO satellite. Note the burst of high-speed particles after the flare creating a snowstorm effect. The stellar flare that Swift detected from a star system called II Pegasi was millions of times more powerful.
Had the sun flared like II Pegasi, these hard X-rays would have overwhelmed the Earth’s protective atmosphere, leading to significant climate change and mass extinction. Ironically, one theory posits that stellar particle outbursts are needed to condition dust to form into planets and perhaps life. The Swift observation demonstrates that such outbursts do occur.
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