Space weather affects your daily life. It’s time to start paying attention

Written by Erin Winick on June 14, 2019. Posted in Current News

Meet the space-weather forecaster leading the charge to help us understand solar flares and geomagnetic storms before it’s too late.

Holed up in a cramped room of her house, Tamitha Skov gets set in front of a makeshift green screen, which has been cobbled together from two green bed sheets. She cues up a script on her computer and hits Record.

Staring down the lens, she says, “We finally quieted down from multiple solar storms that brought us aurora pretty much all over the world last week, and the two regions responsible have rotated to the sun’s backside. What does that mean for you? Those stories and more in the news this week.”

Skov could be one of the thousands of on-air weather forecasters who take to the airwaves each day. But instead of sharing rainfall and temperature forecasts, Skov—a.k.a. the Space Weather Woman—is one of the few who explain space weather.

Hers is a relatively new field. She details things like solar wind, solar flares, geomagnetic storms, and coronal mass ejections—streams of charged particles and magnetic fields that originate in our star’s outer atmosphere.

Space weather can create spectacular auroras. But it can also disrupt and disable satellites that provide services like GPS. It can affect electrical grids, or even threaten astronauts onboard the International Space Station with dangerous levels of radiation.

A number of centers around the globe, like the Space Weather Prediction Center in Colorado, are set up to measure and predict these storms. Using both space-based and ground tools, researchers take pictures and measurements of the sun, and warn governments and companies when dangerous space weather might be approaching. A government, for example, might then respond by shutting down satellites or electrical grids.

Such reports are dense, so Skov simplifies them for non-experts—a task she’s been doing for five years, uploading the reports to her YouTube channel.  Her viewers include groups that rely heavily on satellites, or people who need to know about natural events that arise from space weather—farmers, for example, or members of the US military, aurora photographers, pilots, drone operators, meteorologists, ham radio operators.

“When you get into ham radio, it’s all about the ionosphere,” says Keith Gordon, a pilot, a longtime ham radio enthusiast, and one of Skov’s weekly viewers. “Why can I reach halfway across the world some days, and I can’t get more than 50 miles away other days? Well, our magnetosphere is a living, breathing thing, and it’s driven by the sun.”

Though these small communities follow her work religiously, Skov wants to break space weather out of its niche. “My ultimate goal is to create the field of space weather broadcasting so that it’s on the nightly news, right alongside your terrestrial weather,” she says.

For most of us, paying attention to space weather is about preparation. Just as you’d want advance warning of when your power or internet might go out because of a hurricane, you’d probably want to know when a solar storm might have the same effect. The people of Quebec didn’t get that warning in 1989, when a geomagnetic storm caused a 12-hour citywide blackout. Neither did the residents of Malm, Sweden, in 2003.

Solar storms can cause airlines to reroute flights away from the poles, where radiation concentrates, so a space weather report could indicate that your flight times might change. If you know a mild storm is on its way, you’ll know in advance that Google Maps or Uber—or any other GPS-dependent service—might be unreliable for a while.

Knowing the space forecast is especially important if you live near the poles, or in a country like Brazil, which faces frequent disturbances to GPS because of the plasma bubbles that form along the equator, and atmospheric fluctuations that affect radio signals. Brazil has, in fact, partnered with NASA to launch a small satellite known as a cubesat to better understand the phenomenon, with the idea that locals will know when their GPS and communications services are likely to be inoperable.

Skov didn’t plan for or even hope for this career path. She has a PhD in geophysics and space plasma physics, and initially got on Twitter to promote her music career. Instead she got ingrained in a different community—she started using her solar knowledge to answer questions that early users of Twitter had about space weather, and found herself bombarded with specific questions ranging from why agricultural GPS was having trouble connecting to whether space weather was to blame for drone navigation issues. Then she got requests for space-weather forecasts.

Soon she became the go-to person for solar questions. “I began to realize that not only is there a need for this stuff, there’s a specific need in the specific user groups. And the user groups are getting bigger all the time,” says Skov. Her answer to this gap was creating space-weather forecast videos. Her small but dedicated community of 22,000 subscribers and 32,000 Twitter followers has helped her amass nearly a million views on her channel.

There’s a lot we don’t understand about space weather. “We are trying to take terrestrial weather forecasting techniques and use it for space-weather forecasting,” says Sophie Murray, a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin. “We are quite a few decades off from catching up with them.”

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