The cost of ignoring uncertainties: Why extreme space weather can have a greater impact than we anticipate

Seminar Abstract:

The Sun, a nuclear fusion reactor at the center of our solar system, drives space weather around our planet. Extreme solar storms from the Sun can cause nationwide electric power outages and malfunctions in global satellite networks. The risks rise with our ever-increasing reliance on electricity and space technology. Therefore, to understand and predict these space weather events, we must measure the solar wind. However, our solar wind measurements are an uncertain estimate of the actual solar wind that impacts our planet, as they are made far away from the Earth in the Lagrange point L1. Surprisingly, this uncertainty leads to underestimating our planet's response to extreme space weather.

With increasing solar wind strength, the response of the Earth appears to not increase proportionally and instead saturate during extreme space weather. In the last 40 years, theorists have proposed many explanations for this saturation effect. In this seminar, I will explain how the saturation effect might be a misinterpretation created by ignoring uncertainty in the solar wind that impacts the magnetosphere. My argument is that we need to remove this misleading effect of uncertainties in the solar wind drivers before we can accurately estimate the geospace environment response. Furthermore, the work points to a surprisingly general result relevant to any correlation study: random measurement errors can cause a system's linear response to be perceived as non-linear. 

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For Zoom link please contact Heather Mallander, Heather.Mallander@lasp.colorado.edu

For more info: https://lasp.colorado.edu/home/events-and-outreach/lasp-science-seminars/

Address Info:

LASP – Space Science Building

SPSC-W120

3665 Discovery Drive, Boulder, CO 80303

Map: https://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maps/spsc-w120/