The Earth’s most expensive natural disasters on record include
earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis, but the White House is focused on a far costlier disaster emanating from space.
In November, the White House’s National Science and Technology Council released its
National Space Weather Action Plan
outlining how the federal government might respond to a solar storm,
the term used to describe varying bursts of energy released by the sun.
According to researchers,
an extreme enough solar storm could cripple the world’s electronic and
satellite systems, potentially causing financial damages tallying
over $2 trillion.
Comparatively, the most expensive natural disaster to date was an
earthquake in Japan in 2011 – the quake that also caused the Fukushima
Nuclear Power Plan to fail – that cost approximately $230 billion.
The new plan, authored by a task force consisting of Department of
Homeland Security, White House and National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration officials, is pretty clear about the risk solar storms
pose.
“These critical infrastructures make up a diverse, complex,
interdependent system of systems in which a failure of one could cascade
to another,” the report states. “Given the importance of reliable
electric power and space-based assets, it is essential that the United
States has the ability to protect, mitigate, respond to and recover from
the potentially devastating effects of space weather.”
The plan sets benchmarks for space-weather events and calls for
improvements in forecasting space-weather phenomena, greater
international cooperation and improved assessment modeling.
The plan relies heavily on data NOAA collects from two satellites
located 1 million miles away from Earth that act much like an early
warning system, relaying data back to scientists on Earth when they
detect a solar storm.
The first, the Advanced Composition Explorer, is actually 17 years
old and will be phased out and replaced by the Deep Space Climate
Observatory satellite, or DSCOVR, very soon.
DSCOVR is a refrigerator-sized spacecraft
launched in February that will give scientists up to an hour’s notice
of extreme solar weather, providing higher-quality measurements of solar
magnetic storms and solar wind data than ACE.
In October, NOAA took control of DSCOVR from NASA, which launched the satellite, and
is optimizing the satellite before it becomes fully operational. The
NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center,
which continuously monitors the sun, factors into the action plan as
well, providing the initial notification that a solar flare or storm
occurs.
That initial warning allows up to a 15-hour window to prepare the
Earth’s communication, power and satellite systems in the event of a
serious solar storm.
Still, the White House’s action plan is “only the first step,” as the
document itself states. The next steps will be involving more domestic
and international partners, which will include both industry and other
governments.
“The federal government alone cannot effectively prepare the nation
for space weather; significant effort must go into engaging the broader
community,” the plan states.
The sun emitting potentially dangerous solar flares.
//
NASA
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