Space Weather Unveiled: Recent Events, Physics, and Forecasting Efforts

le 29 novembre 2024, 10h45 à 12h45, Rungployphan Kieokaew, salle Jules Verne, OMP, site Belin

Resumé:  Space weather refers to time-varying conditions in the near-Earth environment as influenced by the Sun via the complex couplings between various envelops of plasmas: the solar wind and magnetic fields, the Earth’s magnetosphere and ionosphere, as well as the neutral atmosphere. Major space weather events – solar storms – are a natural hazard with potentially large socioeconomic impacts in various sectors of the energy, aviation, transportation, and space industries. Prominent examples include March 1989 event that led to over 9 hours of power outage in Québec, affecting about 6 million people, and September 2017 event that led to 3 hours of high-frequency radio outage during the Atlantic hurricane. In this seminar, I will review the recent impactful events that affected our modern technologies. Particularly, I will focus on relevant concepts in electromagnetism and plasma physics. Finally, attempts on forecasting space weather using physics-based models and artificial intelligence will be discussed.