Speaker
Description
Space weather poses a significant threat to critical technologies, including satellite communications, GPS navigation, and power grids, as demonstrated by past severe events like the 1989 Hydro-Quebec blackout and the 2003 'Halloween event'. With Solar Cycle 25 entering a particularly active phase since 2022, understanding and predicting these phenomena is crucial for mitigating economic losses and societal disruptions and ensuring the resilience of our increasingly technology-dependent world. The Forecasting Service SODA (Satellite Orbit Decay), operational within the ESA Space Safety Programme (I.161), aims to predict CME-induced satellite orbit decay, previously focused at an altitude of 490 km. This new SODA 2.0 release significantly enhances these capabilities by now incorporating satellite data from the last 25 years into the forecast base, including major storms such as the Mother's Day event in May 2024. This expansion is vital as past training sets often lacked sufficient superstorm events for robust predictions. Thermospheric mass density variations are calculated using a revised processing chain that leverages a wide range of satellites (e.g., CHAMP, GRACE, GRACE-FO, SWARM, TerraSAR-X) and measurements from both accelerometers and kinematic orbit information. Other new features include the prediction of storm-induced orbital decay for two additional altitude layers (400 km and 450 km), the expansion of new input parameters beyond solely the interplanetary magnetic field component Bz, and the classification of the expected geomagnetic storm's severity using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather G-Scale. These advancements provide a more stable algorithm and thus contribute to more accurate and reliable space weather forecasts.
| Do you plan to attend in-person or online? | In-person |
|---|
