Plans for infrastructure preparedness against solar storms ‘being explored’, government confirms | New Civil Engineer

Space weather, otherwise known as a solar storm, occurs when the sun emits a huge burst of energy in the form of a solar flare or a coronal mass ejection. These eject electrical fields and magnetic charges from the sun at a rate of nearly 5M km/h – with some coming directly towards Earth.

As knowledge around this phenomenon has grown, the impact of space weather on UK infrastructure has been put in the spotlight.

A wide range of solar weather events have impacted Earth since humans have been able to record them, most notably the Carrington event of 1859 which had a direct impact on telegraph stations including in Boston, Massachusetts and Portland, Maine in the USA.

If an event of the scale of Carrington happened today, the impacts on networks and infrastructure would likely be greater but the specifics are difficult to predict because of the low frequency of powerful solar storms – and because our understanding of them has only started to mature relatively recently.

It is an area that the UK government is investigating. In 2021 it published its Severe Space Weather Preparedness Strategy in which it committed to enhancing understanding of space weather, increasing resilience of critical infrastructure and services against space weather and developing an effective way for the UK to respond and recover to a space weather event.

In response to a Freedom of Information request from NCE, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) confirmed policy options to meet these commitments are “being explored”.

What is space weather?

When picturing solar storms and solar flares, we either have an image of a flash of light or perhaps something like a great looping arch leaping up from the surface of the sun. These only reveal simplified details of the anatomy of a solar weather event.

Providing more detail, UCL Department of Space and Climate Physics professor Lucie Green, said: “The first component is the solar flare, which includes x-rays, ultraviolet light and [electromagnetic] radiation across the spectrum. That takes eight minutes to get to us.

“Then you have the eruption, which is the bulk material and that might take between one and four days [to reach Earth].

“But you also get particles accelerated and they might be here in half an hour because they’re travelling extremely fast.”

The process laid out by Green takes place across roughly three stages and each stage is being studied in increasing detail by researchers, in the hope that we can get better at predicting when, where and how damaging storms may impact Earth.

How do we monitor space weather?

UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction honorary visiting professor Ewan Haggarty told NCE: “The sun and the study of it in modern times is actually a very, very young science.

“It’s quite remarkable what we’ve determined about the sun from the observations that we’ve got so far, because it is actually quite difficult to observe.”

Haggarty spent most of his career analysing space weather in the context of protecting critical satellite constellations – groups of satellites, for organisations including the UK Ministry of Defence, the US Department of Defence and Airbus.

He said: “A lot of the deep science depends upon instrumentation that only works once you’ve got it in space.

“So it’s only been since we’ve been putting distant science instruments in orbit that we’ve been getting very far with trying to unpick what the sun is doing.”

As to what we are observing currently, Haggarty said: “The sun goes through a repeated cycle and this is sometimes called a sunspot cycle. That’s every 11 years or so, where the sun goes all spotty and it’s a bit more active, and then it declines and gets hardly any spots at all. And yes, we are heading towards a sunspot maximum at the moment.”

This means that there will be more activity on the surface of the sun that will be visible to us on Earth and could lead to more space weather events.

However, Haggarty was keen to stress that much of the science around solar weather is rooted in probabilities. He said increased cycles of activity on the solar surface could come and go and that a major event could indeed happen in a period of lower overall activity.

This unpredictability makes the ability to send warnings before solar storms happen extremely desirable, but difficult.

Green said “There are two ways you can get a warning when it comes to coronal mass ejections because they take between one day and four days to get to the Earth.

“When you see one leaving, you have some time to predict when it’s going to arrive and what that impact will be. The Holy Grail would be to forecast the eruption before it happens.”

Green said that the fastest high-impact events can take 18 hours to get to Earth, which makes predictability indispensable for people looking after assets such as satellites and energy networks.

What effect will a solar storm have on infrastructure?

In 2013 the Royal Academy of Engineering published a paper titled Extreme space weather: impacts on engineered systems and infrastructure which looked at various transport and infrastructure networks which may be affected by a solar storm.

The paper stated: “The reasonable worst case scenario would have a significant impact on the national electricity grid. Modelling indicates around six super grid transformers in England and Wales and a further seven grid transformers in Scotland could be damaged through geomagnetic disturbances and taken out of service.”

It also touched on the impacts that a solar storm would have on satellite-based global navigation satellite systems (i.e. the US’s Global Positioning System), but details about the effects of a solar storm on rail, aviation and other systems reliant on electricity or electricals were relatively sparse.

Recently, there has been a slightly contradictory range of messages coming from the government and other authorities regarding how concerned people should be about a potential future solar event.

Space weather was added to the government’s national risk register in 2011 and in the 2023 edition was upgraded to posing ‘significant’ risks to the UK’s economy and society.

Recently, research published by Lancaster University found that signaling on railways may be open to manipulation by solar storms. This found that failures in signaling systems where the signal goes from red to green could occur due to a geomagnetic storm once every one or two decades.

However, in a blog post on the National Grid ESO website, the company’s resident space weather expert Andrew Richards said a “solar superstorm… wouldn’t be the armageddon people may be imagining”. That call for calm followed Sky’s fictional drama COBRA (2020-2023) where Great Britain descends into chaos following a massive solar flare causing a nationwide blackout.

In reality, “it’s just really, really difficult [to predict the risk],” according to British Antarctic Survey head of space weather Richard Horne. “I don’t think anyone’s trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. It’s just really difficult to assess. That’s the problem.”

The UK’s recently announced pursuit of expanded nuclear power capacity raises some questions about civil nuclear assets’ resilience to solar storms, given nuclear power stations’ multidecadal lifespans.

An Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) spokesperson confirmed that “the prospect of space weather hazards is fully considered in our assessment of safety cases at UK nuclear licensed sites.”

The ONR spokesperson continued: “We require licensees to identify the potential effects of space weather on nuclear safety and stay updated with the latest research to develop appropriate protection strategies.

“This should take into account the level of uncertainty associated with space weather and any potential effects on electrical systems and electronic components to ensure a proportionate and balanced response.

“The nuclear industry has been undertaking research to consider suitable mitigation strategies including the use of less vulnerable components, operating high voltage devices below rated values, and shielding, error detection/correction and radiation alert monitoring.

“ONR’s External Hazards team considers the different types of space weather which may occur in the future and the potential frequency and severity of such rare events.

“ONR’s engineering specialists also consider if the potential effects on safety systems have been mitigated – with consideration of measures to protect microprocessors, sensors and alarm systems, for example.

“Our regulatory expectation is that all safety systems will not be compromised during a space weather event, either with a nuclear site being intrinsically resilient, or by being shielded from the space weather effect, for example with the use of a Faraday cage.

“If these are not possible, our expectation is that an electrical system defaults to a safe state if affected by space weather.

“It is essential that nuclear licensed sites are safe and secure from all external hazards including remaining resilient to all types of reasonably foreseeable space weather.”

How are we preparing for a space weather event?

Horne is deeply involved in ongoing work to raise the level of understanding of space weather and its impacts on society, and he chairs the Space Environment Impacts Expert Group which provides advice on space weather to the Cabinet Office.

Our understanding of space weather is growing quickly, but our dependence on technology which is potentially vulnerable to solar storms is also expanding.

Horne said within his Space Environment Impacts Expert Group there is a subcommittee which is trying to work out processes and procedures which could enable the Met Office to issue a warning.

“The real problem is there at what stage to call a big high-level alert; coming up with those criteria,” he said. “That’s what’s really difficult because you don’t want too many false alarms.”

There are several significant projects underway by space agencies and meteorologists internationally and in the UK trying to expand shared forecasting capabilities.

The UK’s Met Office runs the Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre (MOSWOC) which runs 24/7, all year round, and is one of three space weather prediction centres around the globe.

Met Office space weather manager Simon Machin, said: “What we do is all about operations and providing [space weather prediction] services to people and improving national resilience.

“The purpose of our scientific research team is to understand what’s going on in academia, to find where the best work is being done, and then to engage with those people to bring that work into operations at the Met Office.”

Referring to MOSWOC, Machin said: “We have a space weather expert [working] 24/7, 365 days a year who is looking at the output from the various models looking at real time data from various sources in space, but also on the ground.

“They are providing written forecasts, issuing alerts or warnings and watching for various kinds of activity and occasionally consulting with customers as well.”

Machin said he has been working with senior people in government for years and the DESNZ, formerly the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy, hosts the ‘senior responsible owner’ who liaises between scientists, forecasters and infrastructure owners to mitigate the impacts of space weather events.

If a space weather event did occur which was predicted to be damaging to Earth-based systems, Machin said the Met Office “would need to be very careful about how [it] communicates with the public, particularly if we’re talking about a large event because we don’t want people to panic.

“It shouldn’t be necessary to panic. People may need to just alter their travel arrangements or make some minor adjustments for a few days.”

He said, depending on the scale of the impacts, the Met Office may need to coordinate communications with central government and get guidance from ministers about how public communications should be delivered.

A DESNZ spokesperson said: “The UK has a secure and diverse energy system with energy security a top priority for protecting households and businesses.”

“Space Weather is an everyday phenomenon that, in the vast majority of cases, causes minimal impact to the Earth’s services.

“However, in preparation for any adverse event, we have invested nearly £20M into predicting and mitigating space weather hazards and are working with industry, academia, and international partners to boost our preparedness and resilience.”

The £20M Swimmr (Space Weather Instrumentation, Measurement, Modelling and Risk) project is funded as part of the Strategic Priorities Fund (SPF), delivered by the UK Research & Innovation (UKRI).

Swimmr is a four-year programme that “will improve the UK’s capabilities for space weather monitoring and prediction.”

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