By Claudia Capos

The Sun, seen above through the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory's Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope, is an unimaginably violent source of energy that affects the Earth in innumerable ways - from weather to the existence of life as we know it.

Around May 10, 1989, a massive stream of charged gases exploded from the Sun. On May 13, the super-heated plasma slammed into the Earth, knocking out a Quebec power grid and leaving six million people helpless for nine hours. Scientists blame the same solar storm for damaging a gas pipeline that exploded and demolished part of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, engulfing two passenger trains in flames. Directly and indirectly, the storm took human life and drained billions of dollars from the world economy.

Similar solar storms continue to bombard the Earth in a cycle that peaks approximately every 11 years. Whereas there's nothing scientists can do to prevent these life-threatening events, they could take preventative measures that would preserve life, resources and money-if they had the ability to predict the storms.

They've lacked this predictive ability, until now.

The Solar Wind Ion Spectrometer

When George Gloeckler, adjunct professor, Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences (AOSS), invented the solar wind ion composition spectrometer (SWICS) in 1978, he gave scientists a way to observe and study solar wind, flares, storms and, more recently, the galactic wind.

Lennard Fisk, professor and chair, AOSS, said SWICS was "a space-breaking development in the evolution of our understanding of the Sun and its influence. It opened up a whole new dimension on the study of the Sun."

Thomas Zurbuchen, adjunct professor and senior associate research scientist, AOSS, heads up the department's Solar and Heliospheric Research Group. "We are trying to connect solar events with local space weather," Zurbuchen said. "This linkage can help us understand how regions of space interact during a solar storm and how solar activity affects technologies and life on Earth." He added that, ultimately, the team hopes to use SWICS to improve the ability to forecast solar events.

Fisk agreed, saying that, in effect, AOSS is "laying the foundation for predictive capabilities about how the Sun will influence Earth."

After the Storm

Following a solar storm, it takes between two and four days for the hot plasma to slam into the Earth's upper atmosphere. Right now, there's a slim, one-hour warning period between the time SWICS detects a solar storm and the moment the plasma makes impact.

With improved computer modeling, AOSS researchers hope to develop more sophisticated forecasting abilities for predicting destructive solar storms. With advance warning, electric companies would have the time to power down the voltage levels of their systems. Telecommunications firms would be able to reroute their signals to back-up satellites that are out of the storm's direct path. Ships and aircraft would have time to switch from global positioning systems, which are distorted by solar storms, to radio or other alternative navigation systems.

A Scientific Milestone

April 21, 2002, Zurbuchen's team was one of the first of a worldwide network of scientists to observe a massive solar storm of a magnitude and type that scientists previously had neither detected nor predicted-it was a milestone for space researchers around the world.

Using SWICS, the team detected a barrage of high-energy particles that had left the Sun and formed a geomagnetic "bubble" and a compressed "bow wave" of solar wind and pick-up ions. The combined forces set off a series of geomagnetic storms 100 miles above the Earth, damaging satellites, cutting communications and creating spectacular auroras that lit up the sky every two to three hours for four days.

Super-heated plasma from solar storms batter the Earth (dot at front of bow wave). The solar wind ion composition spectrometer (SWICS) enables scientists to predict how these storms will affect our planet.

Zurbuchen's team identified the particles and, after further analysis, were able to conclude the reaction on Earth was caused not only by the geomagnetic bubble from the Sun but also by the compressed bow wave of solar wind and pick-up ions pushed ahead as the bubble moved through space.

Zurbuchen and his team hope that by modeling such storms, they might someday be able to forecast violent solar events as much as two to four days before they hit the Earth-time enough to warn the power and telecommunications industries, hospitals, airports and other entities that are significantly dependent on electricity.

SWICS and Zurbuchen's AOSS team are doing work that, quite literally, has implications for peoples and nations around the world.-E

Claudia Capos is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The Detroit News, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday and Travel & Leisure.