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Register a new userSocio-economic hazards and impacts of space weather: the important range between mild and extreme
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Authors
Carolus J. Schrijver
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Society needs to prepare for more severe space weather than it has experienced in the modern technological era. To enable that, we must both quantify extreme-event characteristics and analyze impacts of lesser events that are frequent yet severe enough to be informative. Exploratory studies suggest that economic impacts of a century-level space hurricane and of a century of lesser space-weather gales may turn out to be of the same order of magnitude. The economic benefits of effective mitigation of the impacts of space gales may substantially exceed the required investments, even as these investments provide valuable information to prepare for the worst possible storms.
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In the United States, scientific research in space weather is funded by several Government Agencies including the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA). For commercial purposes, space weather forecast is made by the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Observations come from the network of groundbased observatories funded via various sources, as well as from the instruments on spacecraft. Numerical models used in forecast are developed in the framework of individual research projects. Later, the most promising models are selected for additional testing at SWPC. In order to increase the application of models in research and education, NASA in collaboration with other agencies created Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC). In mid-1990, US scientific community presented compelling evidence for developing the National Program on Space Weather, and in 1995, such program has been formally created. In 2015, the National Council on Science and Technology issued two documents: the National Space Weather Strategy [1] and the Action Plan [2]. In the near future, these two documents will define the development of Space Weather research and forecasting activity in USA. Both documents emphasize the need for close international collaboration in area of space weather.
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