The daily session at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., is a brief rundown of what kind of havoc the ball of gas at the center of our solar system, about 1.3 million times the size of Earth, might have in store for our planet in coming days.
Four-and-a-half-billion-plus years in, earthlings have dodged terminal calamity. But the watching never wavers, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Now, humankind's continued ability to monitor the sun is about to be ensured, with the planned launch no sooner than 4:30 p.m. MST Jan. 31 in Florida of DSCOVR, a refurbished satellite that will be a new set of eyes on what's happening 93 million miles away.
The Deep Space Climate Observatory will take the place of ACE, NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer, which left Earth in 1997. It is still operational but well past the endpoint of its designed lifespan.
Bob Rutledge is lead of the Space Weather Prediction Center, tucked inside the David Skaggs Research Center, a 405,000-square-foot building located on the U.S. Department of Commerce campus on Broadway. He has logged his hours gazing into the sun, the safe way.
"Just watching the sun and trying to figure out what it's going to do, it's a bit surreal, to be honest," Rutledge said. "I look out now and I see the sun is shining, and I appreciate those aspects — the clouds come and go, but the sun is always there.
"But when I look deeply, from a scientific perspective ... there's a lot of things going on beyond just making us warm."
Watching for disaster
The sun is a magnetically active star, and activity such as solar flares, solar wind and coronal mass ejections have the potential to impact a wide range of human doings, from affecting astronauts working at the International Space Station, to airline pilots' ability to maintain radio contact, to a potential disabling of terrestrial power grids by a geomagnetic storm rushing toward our planet at speeds of up to 4 million mph.
It has been predicted, according to NOAA, that the most extreme solar storms could cause $1 trillion to $2 trillion in damages, requiring up to a decade for the Earth to recover.
"During a geomagnetic storm you induce current in the power grid on Earth, and today you could destroy a transformer or destroy dozens of them in a really extreme storm," said Doug Biesecker, chief project scientist on DSCOVR at NOAA. "That's where the concern is. If you were to destroy dozens of transformers, it could take years to replace them all."
Such is the importance of the center's work, its data is cross-checked constantly against a parallel Department of Defense facility.
"The whole (space weather forecasting) community is fairly small, but we also have to make sure that we are passing consistent messages up the chain," Biesecker said. "If the DOD is responding one way and the rest of it is going another way, you could have problems."
The Jan. 8 briefing in the prediction center, with a number of technical support staff members, researchers and an Air Force liaison arrayed near the back of the room and forecaster Meghan Stockman presiding, would have left most visitors somewhere in the solar dust.
It started like this: "We had a G1 watch out for today. We hit a 4P, but we didn't get to 5m," Stockman said. "We did have warnings in for a 4 and a 5 out overnight. And then again yesterday, we had G3 from the storm that we're not sure exactly where it came from."
A big 'wow' factor
The NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center has a scale system — much as its cousin, the National Weather Service, uses for hurricanes — graded 1 through 5 in increasing levels of severity for its menu of watches, warnings and alerts.
Geomagnetic storms carry G1 through G5 designations (for minor up through extreme), while solar radiation storms are designated S1 through S5, and radio blackouts carry R1 through R5 labels.
Stockman, after the briefing, offered a simplified version of what she was telling her colleagues.
"We had a G1-minor geomagnetic storm watch valid" for Jan. 8, Stockman said. "And a warning was issued overnight as conditions approached minor storm levels. Activity came very close but has not yet crossed the G1-minor alert threshold."
Lay people would not be alone in finding the language and the science of the space weather prediction business a bit intimidating.
Nezette Rydell, meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service in Boulder, also under the NOAA umbrella, admitted a level of intrigue with the work of the sun watchers.
"The first time I heard it existed, I said, 'Can I come work for you?'" Rydell said. "There's a big 'wow' factor. But I am not by trade a solar physicist, or a very strong physicist. I'll stay on the ground."
Stockman is someone who has made the jump. She has a degree in meteorology and served as an Air Force weather forecaster for 17 years — and still does so for the Air National Guard.
"I did terrestrial weather, and then this opportunity came up, and I had to see if I could forecast with the big dogs," Stockman said.
The DSCOVR satellite will be positioned at Lagrange point 1, the same gravity-neutral orbit as the outdated ACE satellite, about 1 million miles from Earth. Once earthbound weather leaves the sun, ACE — soon to be supplanted by DSCOVR — provides forecasters' next available tool to see what's approaching.
"We can see what happens on the sun, and then there's a 92-million-mile gap before we have a satellite that captures (data) near the Earth," Stockman said. "So, the first satellite with which we can really start to see the structural makeup of a plasma cloud coming at us is a million miles from Earth. That is the first glance that we get after we have seen it leave the sun."
Put another way, Stockman said, "The sun pitches something at home plate, and we decide whether or not we think it's coming wide left, wide right, or directly at us."
After reaching the satellite, it could be less than an hour before that weather actually impacts Earth.
Among the many clients of the space weather center is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which includes the center in its daily operations briefs and depends on the center's data.
"We maintain a strong partnership with NOAA' Space Weather Prediction Center to ensure we're always prepared to respond" to potential solar hazards, FEMA spokeswoman Susan Hendrick wrote in an email.
"NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center provides us with daily updates on the status of space weather and the potential impacts it could have on our nation."
'Great Ball of Fire'
Biesecker said he "fell into" studying the sun through an internship at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Inspired by that experience, he pursued a doctoral degree at the University of New Hampshire starting in 1988.
In March 1989, a huge coronal mass ejection from the sun caused a blackout in Quebec, he recalled. "I still have, to this day, the framed cover from Time magazine, July 3, 1989, 'Great Ball of Fire — An angry sun stages a spectacular show.'
"Seeing the impact the sun could have on the Earth, beyond what we all learned as schoolchildren, has been my constant companion throughout my career, motivating me because it meant what I was doing could have direct benefit to the nation," Biesecker said.
On March 10, 1989, astronomers had witnessed a powerful explosion on the sun that released a billion-ton cloud of gas, which NASA described as carrying energy of thousands of nuclear bombs detonating at once. That storm cloud burst from the sun, straight toward Earth, at a million miles an hour.
Two days later, the immense solar plasma cloud — a gas of electrically charged particles — hit Earth's magnetic field. The resulting geomagnetic storm triggered a dramatic aurora seen as far south as the Caribbean.
It also sparked electrical currents in the ground beneath much of North America. Early in the morning of March 13, 1989, the currents caused the entire Quebec power grid to lose power for 12 hours, leaving millions in the dark, closing schools and businesses, and affecting power grids well southward into the U.S. Some satellites in polar orbits even lost their bearings, briefly.
That storm was rated a G5, or extreme; another G5 hit Earth in 2003, with less dramatic results.
"A G5 event, we see about once a solar cycle," or about every 11 years, Biesecker said. "A G4, you're talking maybe three to five times in a solar cycle. With a G3, you're probably talking 10 to 20 times (per solar cycle) and when you get down to a G2, now you're taking 50 to 100. And when you're talking G1, you're talking hundreds of times."
Biesecker said the prediction center even issues alerts at below the G1 level.
"Every customer is different. They might care, even at that very low level of storming," Biesecker said. "But the average person doesn't have to worry. The conventional wisdom these days is the average person only needs to be worrying about space weather during a G5 event because that's when we feel the power grid is most at risk."
'Getting attention at the White House'
Even with the importance of an effective prediction system to national global security, getting a new forecasting sentinel into space this month "wasn't necessarily a gimme," according to Rutledge.
NOAA has pitched in $85 million, to repurpose and refurbish the satellite once called Triana, a spacecraft some disparaged as "GoreSat" because then-Vice President Al Gore championed it as not only a climate-change monitor, but as an Earth-cam to inspire future generations of environmentalists.
Gore lost his bid for the presidency in 2000, and his controversial $100 million pet project was shelved, only resuscitated — and recast as DSCOVR — once President Barack Obama was elected to his first term.
Biesecker said plans are already underway for an updated satellite that will replace DSCOVR five years from now, and Rutledge believes there is sufficient global awareness of space weather's importance that keeping an eye on the sun, from space, is now an established priority.
DSCOVR will not only be looking toward the sun. Its suite of instruments will also cast eyes homeward, contributing to scientists' knowledge of climate change through instruments such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology Advanced Radiometer, as well as the NASA Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera.
The radiometer will facilitate a better understanding of changes in Earth's radiation, caused by human activities and natural phenomena, while the NASA camera, called EPIC, will be used to measure ozone and aerosol amounts, cloud height, vegetation properties and ultraviolet reflectivity of Earth.
But it is the spacecraft's role as solar watchdog that has the space weather prediction experts most excited about its launch.
"With the attention that this issue has gotten, it has widened support for this issue," Rutledge said. "It's getting attention at the White House. They are working on a national space weather strategy. With the way awareness has grown, today it is a pretty easy sell. But I don't think that has always been the case."
Rutledge said the launch of DSCOVR is not about deploying a whole new collection of bells and whistles to the cause of planetary defense.
"Essentially, I will have the same things in front of my forecasters as we have today," Rutledge said. "It is securing the key continuity of those observations. Some if it is (providing) faster sampling. But as for the bulk of it, we'll have the same stuff we've got today."
©2015 the Daily Camera (Boulder, Colo.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
