[Chaos-l] Decembers CHAOS meeting

[Jayme Hanzak]

This month we have a astronomical meteorologist. Dr. Brand Fortner is a professor at North Carolina State University. 

Here is a little info on his presentations. 

_______________ 

  

Space Weather-Why it Matters 

The word 'weather' usually refers to what earth's atmosphere is doing today, tomorrow , next week. Severe weather, such as hurricanes, can cause havoc, as we all know. What is less well known is that not only the atmosphere, but space conditions in our solar system can change today , tomorrow , next week.  These rapid changes in the space environment are referred to as 'space weather'. And in direct analogy to atmospheric weather, there can be severe space storms, caused by solar coronal mass ejections. 

"... last night the whole heavens were lighted by the aurora borealis, more brilliant and beautiful than had been witnessed for years before….The light streaks shot upwards from the horizon and varied in width and length, and changed as long as the phenomenon was visible. It was a grand sight..." -- The Baltimore Sun , 1859. 

If this 1859 "SuperStorm" happened today , most of the power grids on the planet will be taken out for months or years, creating societal disruption on an unimaginable scale. Smaller space storms cause changes in satellite orbits, interfere or prevent communication, degrade or eliminate GPS-derived location information, and destroy satellites in orbit.  The challenge is that we have only the crudest ability to predict the behavior of the space environment. Space weather research is an active area of interdisciplinary research: it spans the range from the interior of the Sun to interplanetary space and includes our own atmosphere; it includes fluid dynamics, plasma physics, chemistry, radiative transfer, magnetohydrodynamics; its tools include some of the most advanced first-principles models. The community of practitioners covers the entire Earth. 

I will give an overview of space weather and space weather research, describe current and future space missions that help monitor the solar system space environment, and finish with the challenges to creating a true space weather warning system, a project currently being worked on by scientists at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. 

Brand Fortner 
Research Professor 
North Carolina State University 
________________________ 

  

Please come and join us at 7pm in the Carol Woods Retirement Community's Assembly Hall. 

Carol Woods is located at 750 Weaver Dairy Rd., in Chapel Hill. 

  

We'll see you there. 



Jayme Hanzak 
CHAOS President 

CHAOS 
P.O. Box 3001 
Chapel Hill, NC 27514-0842 
http://www.rtpnet.org/chaos/ 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://rtpnet.org/pipermail/chaos-l/attachments/20101213/bc8ac220/attachment.html>