Solar Storms Affirmative – 4 Week Lab [1/3]
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Solar Storms Coming NowThe next major solar storm will hit in the next two years, sending out an electromagnetic pulse that will destroy the electrical grid and communications systems. Kerr, senior write at Science, 2009 (Richard A, Science, “Are We Ready for the Next Solar Maximum? No Way, Say Scientists” 26 June 2009:Vol. 324 no. 5935 pp. 1640-1641, DOI: 10.1126/science.324_1640, http://www.sciencemag.org/content /324/5935/1640.full , accessed 7-20-11, ASR) Forecasters testing their skills against the sun's mounting ferocity find themselves still in the early days of space weather prediction. The sun violently ejects magnetically confined bubbles of charged particles (left) that collide with Earth's magnetic field (right), triggering geomagnetic storms. The Big One for space physicists struck on 28 August 1859. The sun had blasted a billion-ton magnetic bubble of protons and the like right at Earth. On smashing into the planet's own magnetic cocoon at several million kilometers per hour, the bubble dumped its energy, pushing the solar-driven aurora from its customary arctic latitudes to overhead of Cuba. This once-in-500-years “solar superstorm” crippled telegraph systems for a day or two across the United States and Europe but otherwise was mainly remembered for its dramatic light show. Now that our world has evolved into a so-called cyberelectrosphere of modern electronics, we can hardly hope to fare as well. Today, the charged-particle radiation and electromagnetic fury of a geomagnetic superstorm would fry satellites, degrade GPS navigation, disrupt radio communications, and trigger continent-wide blackouts lasting weeks or longer. Even a storm of the century would wreak havoc. That's why space physicists are so anxious to forecast space weather storms accurately. If predicting a hurricane a few days ahead can help people prepare for a terrestrial storm's onslaught, they reason, predicting solar storms should help operators of susceptible systems prepare for an electromagnetic storm. And space weather forecasters' next challenge is coming up soon. The next peak in the 11-year sunspot cycle of solar activity looms in 2012 or 2013. A space weather symposium* last month asked, “Are we ready for Solar Max?” The unanimous answer from participants was “No.” “I think we are better off ” than a decade ago, says space physicist Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Back then, researchers were about to launch their first concerted effort to predict space weather the way meteorologists predict terrestrial weather, using computer models. “But we probably aren't as ready as we ought to be,” Baker adds. In fact, space forecasters are about where their meteorological colleagues were in the 1960s: making useful but unimpressive forecasts in the short term and lacking computer models able to improve on longer-term predictions by human forecasters. And even the short-term forecasts could go by the boards if the sole but aging early-warning satellite fails before a replacement—as yet unfunded and unplanned—arrives in orbit. Solar Storms Preparedness DecliningWe Are Not Ready for the Next Solar Maximum, We Are Growing More Vulnerable Science Magazine 6/26(Richard A. Kerr, 6/26/09, “Are We Ready for the Next Solar Maximum? No Way, Say Scientists”, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5935/1640.full, JEM) And space weather forecasters' next challenge is coming up soon. The next peak in the 11-year sunspot cycle of solar activity looms in 2012 or 2013. A space weather symposium* last month asked, “Are we ready for Solar Max?” The unanimous answer from participants was “No.” “I think we are better off ” than a decade ago, says space physicist Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Back then, researchers were about to launch their first concerted effort to predict space weather the way meteorologists predict terrestrial weather, using computer models. “But we probably aren't as ready as we ought to be,” Baker adds. In fact, space forecasters are about where their meteorological colleagues were in the 1960s: making useful but unimpressive forecasts in the short term and lacking computer models able to improve on longer-term predictions by human forecasters. And even the short-term forecasts could go by the boards if the sole but aging early-warning satellite fails before a replacement—as yet unfunded and unplanned—arrives in orbit. High-tech target While researchers have been working to improve their forecasting skills, the world has, if anything, become more susceptible to space weather. “The general trend would be increasing vulnerability to the effects of space storms,” says Baker, who chaired a December 2008 workshop report on the subject by the Space Studies Board of the U.S. National Academies. “In general, the systems are becoming softer.” The power grid operates more efficiently, he says, but that gives it less margin for error and less capacity to buffer a storm's disruptions. The surging power-line currents induced by a severe solar storm could push the grid into uncharted territory. GPS technology, especially the highest-precision variety, has become commonplace since the last solar maximum—for navigating planes more autonomously, for example—but it comes with new codes and new signals untested by the ionospheric disturbances of a major solar storm. Now-ubiquitous cell phones are no less vulnerable. Preparedness for Solar Storms is massively declining – instruments are failing Baker et al, University of Colorado Boulder Professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, 2008 (Daniel, Space Studies Board Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences, National Research Council of the National Academies “Severe Space Weather Events--Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts Workshop Report: Committee on the Societal and Economic Impacts of Severe Space Weather Events:A Workshop, National Research Council” http://www.nap.edu/catalog/12507.html, 2008, accessed 7-21-11, ASR) La Porte addressed the issue of how well equipped society is to deal with the potential disruptions caused by space weather events and what the institutional implications of such impacts could be. He argued that space weather events are a classical example of what social scientists call a low-frequency/high-consequence (LF/HC) event, that is, an event that has the potential to have a significant social impact, but one that does not occur with the frequency or discernable regularity that forces society to develop plans for coping with the event.1 The concept of LF/HC events was helpful in giving participants in the workshop a way to think about the social problems associated with and responses to space weather events. La Porte emphasized that this type of event raises a unique set of problems for public (and private) institutions and governance. It requires different types of budgeting and management capability and consequently challenges the basis for conventional policies and risk management. Equally important, he emphasized, is that institutional and social responses to space weather events require a totally different approach than do technical system responses. La Porte pointed out that most social and political institutions are managed on the assumption that they operate within a universe of constant or reliable conditions. Translated to the realm of space weather, this means that social institutions operate under the assumption that they exist in an environment of consistent geomagnetic conditions. The ability of managers to address long-term problems is dependent on their having the time, leadership, and necessary resources to develop robust solutions. When confronted with a LF/HC solar event, however, the leaders of conventional social and political institutions find that management policies based on assumptions of constancy do not work well. Moreover, because of the interrelatedness of the economic and technical systems in modern society, risks to one part of the broader system tend to affect other parts of the system. Consequently, it is difficult to understand, much less to calculate, the risks of future LF/HC events. Sustaining preparedness and planning for such low-frequency events in future years is equally difficult. La Porte emphasized that high-reliability systems are dependent on both technical and organizational phenomena. Each requires highly reliable operations, and each involves a wide range of institutions, technologies, and stakeholders, exhibiting the functional differentiation that is characteristic of a complex, interdependent society. In this context,. the issues that are of particular importance for management are sustaining policy attention to the issue, developing appropriate regulatory responses, and obtaining technical design options that can minimize or eliminate disruptions due to rare extreme events, such as space weather events. Solar Storms prediction capabilities are failing now Foust, 11 – editor and publisher of The Space Review (2-21-2011, Jeff, The Space Review, “When the Sun Sneezes,” http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1783/1) EB As the Sun goes through another peak in activity over the next few years, increasing the number and severity of solar storms, it raises the question of just how prepared we are for disruptions that could result from such storms. The conference session indicated that such planning is, in many cases, quite limited. One particularly significant vulnerability is the growing reliance on satellite navigation systems like GPS, whose signals are used by a wide variety of industries for highly accurate timing data. A solar flare, though, would ionize the upper atmosphere and thus affect propagation of GPS signals through it, increasing errors or even causing outages. How are companies that rely on GPS prepared to react to its interruption in the event of a solar storm? Stephan Lechner of the Institute for the Protection of the Citizen, a European Commission Joint Research Centre, discussed one industry in particular, telecommunications, that uses GPS for time synchronization. “Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer,” he said of an analysis of the industry’s vulnerability. Many GPS receivers used by telco companies, he said, simply assume GPS signals will always be there. There’s also varying awareness of the risks, and corresponding planning, among government agencies. “At the moment, space weather is not on the National Risk Register,” a document prepared by the UK government to plan for various emergencies, said Sir John Beddington, chief scientific advisor to the British government. He added, though, that its inclusion was under consideration, and that volcanic ash was also not in the document before the eruption last year of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, whose ash affected aviation across Europe for weeks. Sweden, whose northerly location makes it more vulnerable to some effects of space weather, has a greater awareness of the effects of space weather. “From a Swedish perspective, it seems quite natural and very essential, actually, to cope with space weather,” said Helena Lindberg, director general of the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, roughly analogous to the US Department of Homeland Security. The so-called “Halloween storm” of 2003, she noted, caused blackouts in southern Sweden for a brief time. However, Lindberg said Swedish concerns about space weather are not shared by other EU countries. “Many of my EU colleagues who I meet with regularly in Brussels still need to be convinced that space weather is just as important as normal weather,” she said. “Here in the US you have managed to place space weather high on the political agenda. This is excellent, and it should be an incentive to the EU.” Improving space weather forecasts A challenge to space weather awareness and planning is predicting the timing and severity of solar storms. Long-range forecasting of solar storms isn’t feasible now, said Juha-Pekka Luntama of the European Space Agency, but in the near term “we can tell when conditions are right for a storm to take place.” An example was last week’s storm: it was preceded by several smaller flares, suggesting a bigger outburst was possible. “Space weather is more or less where meteorology was at the end of the 1950s and going into the 1960s” in terms of forecast accuracy, said Tom Bogdan, director of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. “We are only now just beginning to bring in some of the first numerical, physics-based models into our forecast process. When that happened in meteorology those first models didn’t do so well. It took a while before we learned how to use them.” “Right now our forecast capabilities are not as good as they need to be,” he added. The center works with its various users of its space weather forecasts to let them know what level of confidence the center has in its predictions. “By letting them know how good or bad a forecast is, they can react accordingly.” Aiding those forecasts are data from a number of spacecraft. Of particular utility right now are NASA’s twin STEREO spacecraft, in heliocentric orbits slowing drifting ahead of and behind the Earth. This month, the spacecraft moved into positions 90 degrees on either side of the Earth, and thus 180 degrees apart from each other, allowing them to provide a complete view of the Sun. Such data allow scientists to catch solar activity before it rotates into view of the Earth, providing advanced warning of those storms. While the STEREO spacecraft will continue to drift away from the Earth, Bogdan said NOAA is studying a concept for a solar observing satellite at the Earth-Sun L5 point, 60 degrees behind the Earth, which would provide several days’ warning of solar activity before it rotates into view of the Earth. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 0.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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