Ken Tapping, May 12 2010

I've just got back from this year's Space Weather Week conference, an annual event organized by the US National and Oceanic Administration, and held in Boulder, Colorado. The discussions at the meeting were an exciting mix of solar and space physics, and the impact of the Sun's bad behaviour on our environment and technology.

Space weather is one of the ways the Sun affects us. When space weather is stormy, high energy particles fry satellites and endanger astronauts. They funnel down along the Earth's magnetic field into the Polar Regions, posing radiation hazards to people on high-altitude airliners on polar routes. Bursts of solar X-rays mess up the ionosphere, blacking out radio communications and degrading or even jamming GPS navigation systems. Strong gusts in the solar wind trigger magnetic storms, shutting down power systems and corroding pipelines by inducing electric currents in them.

In general, all these effects are worse at high latitudes. That puts Canada in the firing line for bad space weather, especially as global warming allows us to move more of our activities up into the Canadian Arctic. We will be running more power lines and more pipelines between northern and southern Canada. We need to make those power lines survive and to know the severity of pipeline corrosion problem, so that appropriate inspection and maintenance programs can be set up. The arctic environment is a fragile one, and very vulnerable to our mistakes and accidents.

Global Warming will also open up the North-West Passage year-round. Ships using that route to get between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans can cut thousands of kilometres off the trip and hundreds of thousands of dollars off the fuel bill.

These days GPS is almost the only navigation system we use. How many navigators are still familiar with the sextant and other navigation tools? GPS is far easier to use and much more accurate. It also works in bad weather. However, we have also to consider the impact of bad space weather, which is worse at high latitudes. Moderately bad space weather affects the signals from the GPS satellites, generating errors in the positions indicated by the GPS navigation equipment. Bad space weather can cause the receivers to lose lock, or not work at all. This is an important issue when we consider a heavy traffic of ships going to and fro along the passage, moving through very fragile sea and land environments. Ships have to know where they are, or alternatively, know when they don't.

New space weather initiatives in Canada are intended to address such problems. Our existing solar flux monitors, based here at the NRC Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, are being supplemented with a next generation machine, which will give us a better stethoscope on the Sun's behaviour than ever before. A fully Canadian system for collecting and distributing data is being implemented, including an improved forecasting and warning system. It is a team effort between the National Research Council, Natural Resources Canada and the Canadian Space Agency, and will be up and running before that polar ice melts.