Space Weather Enterprise Forum Includes Broad Range of Discussion

With the 2013 solar maximum nearing, researchers and government agencies are focusing on how the increased solar activity could affect our increasingly technological society and what measures can be taken to help prevent or mitigate any threats to the electricity grid, GPS, and other potentially vulnerable technological soft spots. At the 2012 Space Weather Enterprise Forum, held 5 June in Washington, D. C., Tamara Dickinson, a senior policy analyst with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), stated that “space weather is a serious matter that can affect human economies around the world.” Dickinson said that there has been an increased awareness about space weather in the White House and that President Barack Obama recently requested briefing memos on the topic. Earlier this year, Obama directed OSTP and the national security staff “to aggressively move forward with space weather mitigation efforts,” she said. Dickinson added that because of concerns about the continued healthy operation of the Advanced Composition Explorer, the administration is readying the Deep Space Climate Observatory mission for launch in 2014 as a near-term risk reduction measure to provide space weather data. At the forum, Arthur Charo, senior program officer for the U.S. National Research Council's (NRC) Space Studies Board, previewed NRC's decadal survey for solar and space physics (which subsequently was released on 15 August). He said the survey, which was at that time in review prior to its release, takes a long-term look at the field, recommends top priority scientific goals and directions for the future, and also recommends programmatic directions and priorities for government investments. Charo said that when compared with its 2003 predecessor, the 2012 survey includes more emphasis on evaluating the technical maturity and probable costs of candidate “reference” missions as well an attempt to avoid having outdated cost estimates. “We're really trying hard this time to produce an executable plan,” Charo said. “What we turn over to NASA and NOAA and [the National Science Foundation (NSF)] will actually be something that fits within the reasonable expectation for the future budget.” Given the difficult current budget climate, he added that agencies will need to do more with less and learn how to maximize resources though international partnerships, missions of opportunity, and other measures. “Looking at future budgets, you can't help but think that budgets will not support future needs,” he noted. Charo added that space weather is “a vibrant field” and there has been “remarkable progress” in space weather research over the past decade. However, while some forum speakers called space weather a “team sport” that relies on many agencies working together, Charo expressed concern that U.S. federal agencies are “still operating largely ad hoc vis-à-vis [transitioning] space weather research to [operation].” Researchers and government agency representatives also discussed advances related to space weather research at the Space Weather Enterprise Forum. Among the federal agency representatives, Charles Gay, deputy associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, provided overviews of the agency's Heliophysics System Observatory, which consists of 17 operating missions. He noted new heliophysics missions planned for launch between 2012 and 2018, including the Radiation Belt Storm Probes, scheduled to launch 23 August, and the Solar Probe Plus, slated to launch in 2018, which will fly as close as 9.5 solar radii from the Sun. Other speakers, including agency representatives from NOAA and NSF, also discussed the outlook for space weather research. In addition, several speakers expressed concern about potential damage that could occur from a future space weather event that might conceivably be as large as the 1859 “Carrington” event (named for British astronomer Richard Carrington and the strongest geomagnetic storm on record) or from less powerful events. Even relatively small solar events can cause economic damage, according to forum speaker Karel Schrijver, senior fellow in solar and space science at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company's Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, Calif. Schrijver said that a study of 1216 reports of power grid disturbances between 1992 and 2010 found a pattern in disturbances following severe solar and geospace activity and that there could be several billion dollars in economic impact per year “that have flown under the radar because in part we focus on extreme [space weather] events.” For more information, see http://www.ofcm.noaa.gov/swef/2012/index-swef2012.htm. Randy Showstack is a staff writer at AGU, Washington, D. C. E-mail: rshowstack@agu.org.