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Space Weather: What is it, and Why Should a Meteorologist Care?"Space weather" is a term coined almost 15 years ago to describe environmental conditions ABOVE Earth's atmosphere that affect satellites and astronauts. As society has become more dependent on technology, we nave found that space weather conditions increasingly affect numerous commercial and infrastructure sectors: airline operations, the precision positioning industry, and the electric power grid, to name a few. Similar to meteorology where "weather" often refers to severe conditions, "space weather" includes geomagnetic storms, radiation storms, and radio blackouts. But almost all space weather conditions begin at the Sun--our middle-age, magnetically-variable star. At NASA, the science behind space weather takes place in the Heliophysics Division. The Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, is manned jointly by NCAA and US Air Force personnel, and it provides space weather alerts and warnings for disturbances that can affect people and equipment working in space and on Earth. Organizationally, it resides in NOAA's National Weather Service as one of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction. In this seminar we hope to give the audience a brief introduction to the causes of space weather, discuss some of the effects, and describe the state of the art in forecasting. Our goal is to highlight that meteorologists are increasingly becoming the "first responders" to questions about space weather causes and effects.
Document ID
20080031332
Acquisition Source
Goddard Space Flight Center
Document Type
Conference Paper
Authors
SaintCyr, Chris
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD, United States)
Murtagh, Bill
(National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administraion United States)
Date Acquired
August 24, 2013
Publication Date
May 5, 2008
Subject Category
Meteorology And Climatology
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Work of the US Gov. Public Use Permitted.

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