Space weather refers to geomagnetic storms, coronal mass ejections and other atmospheric disturbances--whether by random natural sunbursts or via man-engineered causes--which will nullify and destroy cyber and electric grid systems for upwards of 6 months.
Hi Robert,
I am not sure if we truly know, but projects are on going to try and assess the impact of these events. I suggest you look into some recent work by Karel (Carolus) Schrijver (see links) who is one of the guys leading this from the science side. I know in his latest preprint he discusses some of the previous risk assessments that have taken place (http://www.lmsal.com/~schryver/Public/ms/swxopinion.pdf).
Hopefully that's of some use and a good starting point!
Richard
http://www.lmsal.com/~schryver/Public/homepage/publications.html
Hi Robert,
I second Richard's advice; and would add that the Space Weather Prediction Center (part of ESRL NOAA) have done similar works and might be worth emailing them as well. I am not certain on their reports off the top of my head, but I work on grid integration and solar activity feeds in as a risk that must be accounted for (along with the more frequent lightning blackouts).
Let me know if you need anymore information on this.
Chris
Hi Robert,
As it was noticed, NOAA SWPC data can be very useful in different space weather events consideration. See http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ and http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/noaa-scales-explanation to gain insight in them.
Also you can find a lot of information about magnetic storms and artificial disturbances from works by Leonid F. Chernogor.
There are plenty of difficulties in defining the worst case emissions let alone their effects. The Carrington event of 1 September 1859 is generally taken as worst case on timescales of 100 to 200 years. However there is evidence from C14 and superflares on similar stars that we can receive 10 to 100 times worse than that. You mention effects on the electrical grid but there are plenty of others such as radiation effects on spacecraft, aircraft passengers and avionics, GPS, communications etc. For an assessment of the effects of a Carrington level event I suggest that you look at the Royal Academy of Engineering report "Extreme space weather: impacts on engineered systems and infrastructure," published in Feb 2013 and available from their website: www.raeng.org.uk/spaceweather.
Hi, Robert.
There are two unknowns which should be estimated:
One is the largest space weather event
Another is the largest impact on the technology.
The attempts to estimate the first one using the extreme event statistics methods are made, while for the second one it is still not quite clear (at least for me, having 15 years experience in the space weather forecast and impacts studies). The problem with the second "engineering" part of the puzzle is that during the largest known events (Carrington, see the above) there were no modern technology to be impacted. Recent events did not give much impact, the physics of the, for example, transformer saturations under quasi-DC currents is still not quite developed. Thus, the short answer to your question is "no". But it is definitely possible to estimate the impacts of some particular event with some level of accuracy for each particular case of interest. I would not recommend to rely on the "scary" stories and the "science fiction" movies on that regard. Research and more research- this is what we (society) need.
Regards,
Dr. Larisa Trichtchenko
Space weather can also be strongly influenced by the nearby gamma-ray burst or supernova explosion. The energetics of these events (more than ~1051 erg) would be enough to destroy the Earth ozone layer. For instance, as it is shown in link below, the supernova explosions in the Scorpius-Centaurus OB association could seriously damage the Earth ozone layer, provoking or contributing to the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary marine extinction.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.88.081101
There have already been a lot of good answers to this question. However I would also like to point your attention to the Royal Academy of Engineering's report, "Extreme space weather: impacts on engineered systems and infrastructure" (the full report is at the included link).
This was a report commissioned by the UK Government to investigate the impact of a "solar superstorm". It talks about the science behind these events, but its main focus is on the impacts of such an event. Although this is a UK-centric report, many of the results/conclusions are valid worldwide and should hopefully provide you with some answers to your questions.
http://www.raeng.org.uk/publications/reports/space-weather-full-report
Hi to Everybody!
Evidently, at present the science can not estimate correctly the outcomes of a damaging space weather event. The most damaging events at the globe are very strong earthquakes, which occurrens is related somehow to solar activity (please, see attached file). Nobody knows what does it means, while the understanding could help to save a lot of peoples.
Galina
All suggestions and advisories are appreciated--thank you all---certainly estimating the largest event and the largest impact would be an enviable research outcome--however we need to devise a pragmatic scale of events and effects which somehow helps governments and scientists to better calibrate the net impact and risk of space weather events.
Robert,
I would like to note that first of all "pragmatic scale of events" is occurrence rate of events. I am not sure that the governments will finance researches of impact of such events which arise with frequency not higher than one event during ~ 500 years as the Carrington storm in 1859.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jgra.50467/full
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