12 April 2011 | General, ESSEM
Did the first human in space wonder what the weather would be like?
50 years ago today, Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. Since COST has Actions on the topic of space weather, we cannot help but wonder if the weather was on his mind at the time.
Extreme space weather conditions may threaten safety and security of humans and technological infrastructures. The impact of space weather ranges from technical problems with satellites arising from charged particles to problems experienced by power transmission grid operators on the ground during geomagnetic storms.
The solar activity is the main driving force of Space Weather which affects the interplanetary space and planetary magnetospheres, ionospheres and atmospheres.
ESSEM COST Action 724 Developing the Basis for Monitoring, Modelling and Predicting Space Weather developed a European framework for the science underpinning space weather applications and explored methods for providing a comprehensive range of space weather services to a variety of users, based on modelling and monitoring of the Sun-Earth system.
Two of the main successes of the Action were to gather a community of 28 countries associated with the European Space Agency (ESA). As nowadays there is no international consensus on a definition of Space Weather, the Action agreed on a European definition of Space Weather: "Space Weather is the physical and phenomenological state of natural space environments. The associated discipline aims, through observation, monitoring, analysis and modelling, at understanding and predicting the state of the Sun, the interplanetary and planetary environments, and the solar and non-solar driven perturbations that affect them, and also at forecasting and nowcasting the potential impacts on biological and technological systems".
ESSEM Action ES0803 is taking that knowledge one step further and looking at developing space weather products and services in Europe by creating an interdisciplinary network between European scientists dealing with different issues of Geospace as well as warning system developers and operators.
