New agency will monitor space weather

17 Jun 2002

Space weather, like the more familiar lower-atmosphere weather, is a vast agglomeration of fronts and storms that changes by the minute. Filled with radiation and particles arriving from the sun and influenced by a potent terrestrial magnetic field, the near-earth space environment is increasingly important because of the numerous communications and positioning satellites parked there. Components on these craft, as well as astronauts and even passengers in high-flying aircraft, are also potentially endangered when storms on the sun send flurries of particles toward our planet.

The National Space Weather Program, an inter-agency system of weather-forecasting instruments and data processing centers, will in coming years provide up-to-the-minute assessments of near-earth conditions, researchers reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco earlier this month.