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Loading contentThe Sun is not a constant. It flares, it flings billion-tonne clouds of plasma at the Earth, and it breathes on an eleven-year cycle — and when its weather reaches us, it can knock out radio, scramble GPS, endanger astronauts, and darken power grids. This is the operational science of watching the Sun and defending against it.
Where space weather begins — the solar cycle, sunspots, active regions, coronal holes, and the ionosphere they disturb.
5 entriesHow solar activity reaches technology and people — satellites, GPS, aviation, human spaceflight, power grids, and radio.
6 entriesThe operational services that watch the Sun and warn the world — Europe's space-weather service network.
1 entriesAircraft on polar routes can lose high-frequency radio contact during solar radio blackouts and are exposed to raised radiation levels during solar particle events, sometimes forcing flights to divert to lower latitudes.
Satellite navigation signals pass through the ionosphere, and when solar flares and geomagnetic storms disturb it the signals are delayed and scattered, degrading positioning accuracy — a serious concern for aviation, surveying, and precision agriculture.
Radiation is one of the central hazards of human spaceflight. A large solar particle event can deliver a dangerous dose to astronauts, especially beyond the protection of Earth's magnetic field, and crews may need to shelter in more shielded parts of a spacecraft.
Geomagnetic storms drive currents in the ground that flow into long transmission lines — geomagnetically induced currents — which can saturate and damage transformers and, in severe cases, cause regional blackouts. The 1989 Québec blackout is the classic example.
The X-rays from a solar flare suddenly increase the ionisation of the day-side ionosphere, absorbing high-frequency radio waves and causing radio blackouts across the sunlit Earth — the effect measured by NOAA's R-scale.
Spacecraft are exposed to the full force of space weather: energetic particles charge their surfaces and interiors and flip bits in their electronics, while geomagnetic storms heat and expand the upper atmosphere, increasing drag and pulling low-orbit satellites down faster.
Each solar phenomenon, operational impact, and forecasting service is a first-class knowledge-graph entity resolved through the Scientific Data Engine, reusing the space-weather phenomena, the NOAA G/S/R scales, the solar-energetic-particle and Van Allen radiation environments, the Parker Solar Probe, Solar Orbiter, DSCOVR and ACE missions, and the SWPC already in the graph. Curated from NOAA SWPC, NASA, and ESA. Operational impacts are described from documented effects. See source quality.