In the age of anthropogenic climate change, there is no shortage of headlines about the impacts of the increasingly frequent and severe weather patterns unfolding on the Earth’s surface.
And while the attention is certainly warranted as the international community endeavours to develop sustainable energy solutions, there are also some researchers who are focused on studying severe storms that are out of this world.
Ian Mann, a physics professor at the University of Alberta, is among them.
“I think it’s a genuine threat that we need to be aware of,” Mann recently said about severe space weather such as radiation bursts and electromagnetic storms from the sun that have the potential to wreak havoc not only on electricity distribution systems on the planet’s surface but also humanity’s extensive network of communications satellites in orbit.
“Lots of people are working internationally to try to estimate the size of these things,” he told the Albertan during an interview. “So, how big and how bad could a space storm be, and what’s its likelihood?”
Although rare, there are disconcerting historical precedents such as the 1859 Carrington Event that alone should prompt proactive research to improve humanity’s preparedness for the next one-in-100 year geomagnetic storm, he said.
“There was no global power distribution network at the time,” he said. “But there were telegraph networks, and so there’s contemporary reports of telegraph lines setting on fire as a result of the electric currents that were driven in those networks because of the storm.”
So an important question to ask, he asserts, is precisely what would happen to modern infrastructure such as power grids in the event of a repeat of such a storm. While work on that front has begun, those efforts should be ramped up, he said.
“In my view, it needs to be accelerated,” he said, adding more detailed and accurate studies are required to get a clearer understanding of the current makeup of electrical distribution networks to determine what steps could be taken to mitigate impacts.
“We need to understand how this works; not in a the-sky-is-falling way, but to understand what does a one-in-100 year storm look like,” he said.
Solar activity not all the same
Coronal mass ejections created by the sun are but one source of solar activity. There are also other phenomena such as solar winds whose constantly blowing gusts range anywhere from 250 kilometres per hour to rarer extremes of 900 kph, along the way slamming into the planet with the potential to suddenly deliver vast amounts of energy, he said.
A solar flare is a burst of electromagnetic radiation of specific wavelengths such as X-Rays that have the potential to disrupt the conductivity of the atmosphere’s layers at altitudes of about 100 kilometres, or the ionosphere, he said.
“That region is important because some long distance communications require signals to bounce off the ionosphere,” he said, adding GPS signals come through that portion of the ionosphere.
“And so there can be errors with GPS and communications associated with solar flares,” he said.
Clarifying a common misconception, he said solar flares – which are essentially bright bursts of electro-magnetic energy – do not produce auroras, which are more the result of particle-spewing coronal mass ejections that sometimes can occur in tandem with a flare.
“There can be big flares without these phenomena (like the northern lights) taking place,” he said, adding the most potentially impactful solar activity in terms of socio-economic effects or downstream risks to health, are associated with the electric fields that come from the magnetic changes associated with big space storms.
A big enough space storm can produce and drive large electrical currents through space that have their own magnetic field associated with them, he said.
Power grids vulnerable
“That electric field can drive a current in another circuit or pathway nearby” such as Earth’s magnetic field, he said.
Not unlike a transformer in a power grid that changes the current from one circuit and transforms it to another voltage in a second circuit, giant currents flowing through space on a planetary scale due to a big solar storm can, as they change, also have the same impact where they try to induce electrical currents in other conductors that may be in their vicinity, such as the planet’s surface, he said.
“So, they will drive currents in the Earth’s crust, depending on its resistivity,” he said. “But they will also drive currents in other conducting infrastructure; potentially the most vulnerable, is these long lines associated with electricity distribution.”
Power grids are vulnerable to what are called geomagnetically-induced currents, which in essence are a DC current imposed on top of AC transmission lines that translates into energy that heats up transformers, he said.
“In a worst case, it can burn out the transformer completely,” he said.
In that event, the current can end up being diverted into another part of the grid’s distribution network, potentially overloading another part of the system and triggering a snowball effect.
“That means the power’s going out,” he said. “And then the question is, for how long is it going out for?”
Irreparably damaged transformers must of course be replaced, which takes as long as is required to obtain and install a replacement part, he said, later adding that since transformers don’t typically fail on a widespread scale, the industrial capacity to mass produce that many new transformers at the same time simply does not exist.
“The potential is that you burn out a big piece of your electricity distribution network and then you’re not able to bring it back up until you have the replacement parts,” he said.
Studying potential climactic impacts
Yet there’s more to studying severe space weather than attempting to ascertain how infrastructure in orbit and on the surface will be affected.
“In the models, we see evidence that radiation can influence the atmosphere and can change some of the energetics and dynamics there. The models show that there can be an influence from this process that comes all the way down to the surface – the troposphere – to have an impact on climate dynamics,” he said.
“Now, that’s not to say that space weather is the explanation of climactic change; it’s absolutely not,” he said emphatically.
“It’s crystal clear that the climate emergency is being caused by man-made emissions. However, in order to understand the trajectory that the planet is going on and to be able to then take the best steps based on the best scientific knowledge, we really need to understand how the entire planet is responding to the climactic change that’s being forced by human activity.”
But among the least documented and understood pieces of that equation is the extent to which space weather might be coupled into those atmospheric dynamics, he said.
“What you need in the models is an accurate characterization of how much radiation is being built up in the atmosphere, and when; and we don’t have that at the moment,” he said.
“We need to better comprehend how these climate pieces fit together, and that must include how the space weather piece fits into dynamics in the atmosphere,” he said. “It’s important to emphasize, that this is not a get out of jail free card to blame the sun for climactic change. Unfortunately, human kind is responsible – unquestionably so.”
Sending a satellite straight into solar weather
Enter a new, made-in-Canada mission to the stars that aims to send a satellite directly into severe space weather not only to grow our collective understanding of the phenomena, but also provide crucial information that could help develop strategies to mitigate its impacts on our infrastructure, he said.
“This mission is designed to measure the rate at which this radiation is being dumped into the atmosphere, because we want to know how quickly the radiation environment in space is being emptied back to quiet levels,” he said.
Although first proposed in 2019, the mission dubbed RADICALS – an acronym for RADiation Impacts on Climate and Atmospheric Loss Satellite – only more recently secured funding following a competitive bidding process in the amount of roughly $20 million through Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Alberta government, the Canadian Space Agency, as well as some contributions from industry partners, he said.
So while the mission for now remains in its infancy, the next steps are being taken to design, develop and test the probe, which if successful will provide a more accurate understanding of how radiation flows into and accumulates in the atmosphere and how long it takes before levels return to normal.
“What we’re trying to do, is to provide measurements that will allow that pathway to be properly characterized,” he said.
Satellites come in a range of sizes from smaller craft weighing barely a few kilograms to the larger, vehicle-sized geosynchronous communications platforms that can tip the scale at 1,000 kgs or more. The RADICALS payload is expected to weigh in around 70 kgs, he said.
“Our target launch timeframe is 2026 or maybe early 2027,” he said, adding missions to space take time to develop as components must be thoroughly tested to ensure they’ll function even in the harsh conditions of space.
“There’s a number of options within the launch marketplace that could deliver the satellite to its scientific orbit,” he said, enthusiastically extolling what he describes as a new space race.
“It’s much easier to get to space now.”
A new space age
Once exclusively the realm of national and multi-national space agencies with deeper pockets, the transition toward the commercialization of space has opened the doors of discovery even to teams of university students, he said.
“That’s really an enormous transformation in the field, which is going to reverberate across the economies around the world,” he said.
“You can really see a revolution – a new space race if you will – that’s taking place, where services and information that’s required for good governance, good decision making or for commercial services, are all being collected from space,” he said.
And RADICALS is part of that transition.
“Everything except the launch will be a made-in-Canada solution,” he said, adding ground stations in the country will be used to command and operate the satellite.
“That’s a real economic opportunity for those countries who can place themselves at the forefront of space innovation; the development of new technologies and new ideas, and then to exploit them,” he said, calling it a “huge opportunity for Canada.”
The instruments will all be built at the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary, while the spacecraft itself will be constructed at the University of Toronto.
“It’s really a partnership between key space partners in academia, government agencies, and Canadian industry,” he said.
“We hope it’s going to demonstrate Canadian capability to provide scientific leadership in the space domain; I think that’s very important as we look to develop a new space economy. We need highly trained and competent people to enter that economy; it’s expanding like crazy.”
Space research and development in Canada’s best interests
But aside from the potential economic benefits of being at the vanguard of developing tomorrow’s space tech, Canada also has another vested interest in better understanding the impacts of solar storms.
“We’re closer to the action in Canada, so to speak. We get to live with it in all ways; with the beauty of the northern lights as well as the potential impact from space weather effects that are less pleasant than those associated with looking at the northern lights,” he said.
“Our power networks receive much more geomagnetic disturbances than do, for example, those that are south of U.S. border,” he said.
“Our cities are closer to the larger space weather disturbances, especially the electromagnetic ones which can be a potential threat to the power grid,” he said.
“It almost behooves us as Canadians to take advantage of the opportunity to understand space weather dynamics. But there’s also a self-serving reason for that too in that we are more vulnerable to some of the most intense space weather effects than other nations who are at more equatorial latitudes,” he said.
“It’s an opportunity to lead scientific discovery in this important domain, but also to provide some level of leadership of the translation of that knowledge into the ability to prepare, prevent and mitigate some of the worst effects that might occur from space weather.”
That requires growing our understanding of how extreme space weather can become and how seriously its effects can impact infrastructure like electricity distribution networks, he said.
Canada already has an extensive network of ground-based instrumentation that measure for example particle precipitation, electromagnetic disturbances as well as a radiation flows in the ionosphere, he said.
“We work with the Canadian Space Agency and other space agencies to combine ground-based measurements with those from satellites, where we can literally fly into the space storm,” he said.
And while scientific research has developed a greater understanding of how that harsh radiation is created and what contributes to making a nasty radiation environment, “we have a much poorer understanding of what conditions allow the radiation to come back to the green zone,” he said.
“So, the mission is studying the dynamics of that radiation from lower orbit; and in particular, it’s studying one of the primary mechanisms for the loss of that radiation, and that is for it to be dumped into the atmosphere,” he said.
“There’s really only two choices to reduce the radiation environment out there after it’s been accelerated: one is for it to leave the system and be lost to interplanetary space, and the other is for it to be dumped into the atmosphere. It’s the latter of those that we’re focusing on with this mission.”
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