Impact on Life on Earth (and in Space)

Just as Earth weather can do damage to homes and other property and disrupt our lives, Space Weather can cause damage to satellites, and affect our communications, navigation, and power systems, disrupting our lives. Therefore, studying space weather is important to our national economy because solar storms can affect the advanced technology we have become so dependent upon in our everyday lives. This could have a major economical impact.
- Cost of a major power blackout: $4-10B (billion dollars) - An extreme solar storm (like the one from 1859): $1-2T (trillion dollars)
- January 1994; the outage of two Canadian telecommunication satellites took 6 months to recovery and the cost was $50-70M (million dollars).
Scientists around the world use data from spacecraft and ground-based instruments to monitor space weather patterns - magnetospheric storms and substorms - in hopes of one day being able to predict space weather. If we knew two days earlier that a large space storm was headed our way, we could close down any satellite in the path of the storm and give them better protection from the radiation, reduce the power output of large electrical power companies on Earth and be able to protect some of their expensive power grid components. CREDIT: NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (Little SDO)