Understanding Space Weather
How the Sun's weather is made and how it reaches the Earth — the solar cycle and its storms, and their impacts on satellites, navigation, aviation, astronauts, and power grids — and the operational forecasting that watches for it. Built on documented effects and real forecasting services; nothing is fabricated.
In pictures
Related entities
- Space-weather phenomenon
The Solar Cycle
The roughly eleven-year rise and fall of the Sun's activity, traced by the number of sunspots from solar minimum to solar maximum and back. Its underlying magnetic cycle takes about twenty-two years, as the Sun's polarity flips and returns. Activity — flares, CMEs, and storms — peaks near solar maximum.
- Space-weather impact
Power Grids
Geomagnetic storms drive currents in the ground that flow into long transmission lines — geomagnetically induced currents — which can saturate and damage transformers and, in severe cases, cause regional blackouts. The 1989 Québec blackout is the classic example.
- Space-weather impact
Satellites
Spacecraft are exposed to the full force of space weather: energetic particles charge their surfaces and interiors and flip bits in their electronics, while geomagnetic storms heat and expand the upper atmosphere, increasing drag and pulling low-orbit satellites down faster.
- Organization
ESA Space Weather Service Network
The operational space-weather arm of the European Space Agency's Space Safety programme, delivering forecasts, warnings, and data products — on solar activity, the near-Earth environment, and the ionosphere — to European operators of satellites, power grids, aviation, and navigation. The European counterpart to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.