Space weather impacts on satellites and forecasting the Earth's electron radiation belts with SPACECAST

Abstract

[1] Satellites can be damaged by high energy charged particles in the Earth's radiation belts and during solar energetic particle (SEP) events. Here we review the growing reliance on satellite services, new vulnerabilities to space weather, and previous events that have led to loss of service. We describe a new European system to forecast the radiation belts up to 3 h ahead, which has three unique features: first, it uses physics-based models, which include wave-particle interactions; second, it provides a forecast for the whole outer radiation belt including geostationary, medium, and slot region orbits; third, it is a truly international effort including Europe, United States, and Japan. During the 8-9 March 2012 storm and SEP event, the models were able to forecast the >800 keV electron flux to within a factor of 2 initially, and later to within a factor of 10 of the GOES data. Although ACE and GOES data became unreliable during the SEP event, the system continued forecasting without interruption using ground-based magnetometers. A forecast of the 24 h electron fluence >2 MeV is used to provide a risk index for satellite operators. We show that including wave-particle interactions for L* > 6.5 improves the agreement with GOES data substantially and that a fast inward motion of the magnetopause to L* < 8 is related to rapid loss of relativistic electrons at geostationary orbit. Thus, we suggest that better wave-particle models and better coupling between the solar wind and the models of the magnetopause and radiation belts should lead to better forecasting.

Coronal mass ejections and their sheath regions in interplanetary space

“…High-energy electrons can penetrate through the spacecraft shielding and get access to dielectric materials, which can over time lead to discharges that can be hazardous to the components or even entire subsystems (e.g., Horne et al 2013;Baker and Lanzerotti 2016).…”

Probabilistic approach to nonlinear wave-particle resonant interaction

“…This is a fundamental process, responsible for many phenomena in space and laboratory plasmas. One of the brightest examples is electron acceleration in radiation belts, which results in aurora formation [1,2] and represents a real hazard for artificial satellites in activity [3]. Assuming that the wave spectrum is wide enough and the wave intensity is sufficiently low, one can model the wave-particle resonant interactions using quasi-linear theory [4][5][6][7] generalized for systems with inhomogeneous magnetic field and background plasma [8,9].…”

The effects of the big storm events in the first half of 2015 on the radiation belts observed by EPT/PROBA-V

“…The high energy electrons cause a range of problems for satellites like internal satellite charging effects while protons produce cumulative dose and damage, as well as prompt single event effects. Forecast is thus crucial and needs accurate measurements associated to good understanding of the physical mechanisms associated to the flux variations (Horne et al, 2013). Different empirical and/or physics-based models have been developed for electrons (for instance Vette, 1991;Brautigam et al, 1992) and for protons (Heynderickx et al, 1999).…”