Seminar of Department of Theoretical Physics - Michaela Brchnelová (26.11.2024)
Tuesday 26.11.2024 at 14:30, Lecture room F2/125
Michaela Brchnelová:
Space weather: the good, the bad and the ugly
Abstract:
In 1967, space weather almost caused the third world war when the Sun blinded the US Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, with the Americans thinking that this was caused by the Russians. In 1989, millions of people in Québec, Canada, remained without electricity for hours as a result of a geomagnetic storm. In 2015, Sweden had to ground air traffic for over an hour as a result of a solar storm. Space weather can disrupt our critical systems and infrastructure, and the only way to mitigate and/or limit its damage remains, for now, accurate forecasting and modelling of its phenomena in real time. As these phenomena, however, contain fairly advanced physics, including some of it that we still do not understand, modelling these in real time ranges between difficult to impossible, depending on the accuracy that we need to achieve. In this seminar, I first introduce the topic of space weather, including the causes and the possible effects. Then, I will talk about some of the techniques we currently use to model and forecast it and where the current biggest challenges lie.