DSCOVR Funding Cut Now
ACE is beyond its operational strife and no replacement has been made
Eccleston, Chief Consultant for the Environmental Planning and NEPA Services Corporation and Stuyvenberg, Environmental Project Manager, US Nuclear Regulatory Comission, 2011
(Charles and Andrew, Environmental Quality Management, “The Perfect Electrical Storm? “ Volume 20, Issue 3, Article first published online: 14 MAR 2011, DOI 10.1002/tqem / Spring 2011 / 43 Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tqem.20288/pdf , accessed 7-2-11, ASR)
Monitoring Solar Activity Monitoring of solar activity is conducted by the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), an agency of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The SWPC categorizes space weather activity on a scale ranging from one (minor) to five (extreme).14 Much of the data reported by the SWPC is collected from NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE), a robotic spacecraft launched in 1997 that orbits the earth at a distance of about a million miles. ACE is the SWPC’s “sole source of real-time upstream solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field data.”15 Unfortunately, however, as the NAS report notes, ACE “is well beyond its planned operational life, and provisions to replace it have not been made.”16 So our primary sentinel against solar catastrophe may not even be operable when it is needed most.
ACE cannot detects one third of major storms, gives off false alarms, and can only give a short window of notice
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)
A big part of the problem, Hildner said, was a dearth of observations. Space weather forecasters used ground-based telescopes to observe sunspots, solar flares, and other signs that the sun was primed to launch solarstorm-inducing disturbances toward Earth. But forecasters had no spacecraft between the sun and Earth to record the passage of threatening solar disturbances, much less whether they were actually going to hit Earth. It was “like predicting Washington, D.C., weather with one weather station in San Francisco,” Hildner said. Enter ACE. In 1997, the Advanced Composition Explorer arrived at its station, L1 or Lagrangian point 1, about 1.5 million kilometers sunward of Earth. There it could monitor the high-speed bubbles of protons and other charged particles—called coronal mass ejections (CMEs)—that would slam into the bulbous end of Earth's teardrop-shaped magnetosphere 30 to 60 minutes after passing ACE. The speed and density of a CME reflects its total energy. But ACE also reports the orientation of the magnetic field embedded in a CME, which must be opposite that of Earth's magnetic field if the CME's power is to gain entry to the magnetosphere and drive a storm. ACE made the first short-term storm warnings possible in 1999. Issued only 20 to 60 minutes ahead of a storm's arrival by the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC, the former Space Environment Center), the warnings have fallen far short of perfection. One-third of major storms arrive unheralded and almost one-quarter of the warnings turn out to be false alarms, according to SWPC's own analysis. More severe storms are so rare that it's hard to say how much skill forecasters have in predicting them, says Christopher Balch, acting head of SWPC's forecast office. ACE can offer no help with forecasting storms a day ahead. Next-day SWPC forecasts of geomagnetic activity based on observations of the sun have performed better than simply assuming that the current day's conditions would persist into the next day. But next-day forecasts performed no better than if forecasters assumed the next day would be like the average of the previous 30 days. Accurate forecasting 8 hours to 1 day ahead, Baker concludes, “is just not in the cards right now.”
ACE Fails Now
ACE has no successors proposed and forecasting solar storms will most likely not be resolved until the next solar max.
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)
Space weather forecasters face extra hurdles. There's still a severe dearth of observations to feed into the models. And rather than evolving within one relatively uniform atmosphere, space weather progresses from the near-vacuum of a million-degree solar corona—where magnetic fields rule—to Earth's relatively dense, cold upper atmosphere and eventually the ground: “sun to mud,” as they say. That forces researchers to develop a dozen submodels to make a chain linking the sun to Earth. Space scientists hoping to transfer their research models to the forecasting arena should “expect to have your egos hurt,” magnetospheric physicist W. Jeffrey Hughes of Boston University (BU) said at the May meeting of the American Geophysical Union. “It's a painful process.” To ease the pain of moving from research modeling to day-to-day forecasting, the American space weather community has developed a loose structure for creating and testing forecast models. Two 8-year-old centers—one at the University of Michigan (UM), Ann Arbor, and the other an 11-institution consortium headed by BU—vie in friendly competition to develop physics-based, sun-to-Earth models. A 10-year-old interagency modeling center at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland, is evaluating 30 contributed submodels. Finally, a test bed will soon be created at SWPC for debugging candidate submodels before they go operational. No model—not even a submodel—has made it through this system to operational status. A submodel called ENLIL is leading the pack, says SWPC Director Thomas Bogdan. ENLIL forecasts how newly formed CMEs will propagate from the sun to ACE. But it won't become operational for 2 to 3 years, around the time of solar max, when it will be run on the same supercomputer National Weather Service forecasters use. Models carrying the disturbance into and through the magnetosphere and the atmosphere and to the ground all trail ENLIL. “We've made very good progress in the last decade,” says space physicist Tamas Gombosi, director of the UM modeling center. “But can we forecast? No. We have a long way to go. My hope is that not this solar max but the next, physics-based forecasting” will be a reality. In the meantime, scientists are keeping their fingers crossed for ACE. At 12 years old, it has entered satellite old age. It and the 14-year-old SOHO satellite that images CMEs near the sun “can fail any time, no one knows,” notes Michael Hesse, director of the modeling center at GSFC. Although enough time remains to build and launch a backup for ACE's monitoring system, none has been proposed, much less funded.
ACE is failing and there are no status quo replacement plans—not replacing it could cost millions of lives
Brooks 9 – consultant for New Science (Michael, 3-23-2009, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, “Space Storm Alert: 90 Seconds from Catastrophe,” http://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/broadbandgrants/comments/7927.pdf) EB
There is another problem. ACE is 11 years old, and operating well beyond its planned lifespan. The onboard detectors are not as sensitive as they used to be, and there is no telling when they will finally give up the ghost. Furthermore, its sensors become saturated in the event of a really powerful solar flare. "It was built to look at average conditions rather than extremes," Baker says. He was part of a space weather commission that three years ago warned about the problems of relying on ACE. "It's been on my mind for a long time," he says. "To not have a spare, or a strategy to replace it if and when it should fail, is rather foolish." There is no replacement for ACE due any time soon. Other solar observation satellites, such as the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) can provide some warning, but with less detailed information and - crucially - much later. "It's quite hard to assess what the impact of losing ACE will be," Hapgood says. "We will largely lose the early warning capability." The world will, most probably, yawn at the prospect of a devastating solar storm until it happens. Kintner says his students show a "deep indifference" when he lectures on the impact of space weather. But if policy-makers show a similar indifference in the face of the latest NAS report, it could cost tens of millions of lives, Kappenman reckons. "It could conceivably be the worst natural disaster possible," he says.
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