Van Allen Lecture: Space Weather

Presiding:  M F Thomsen, Los Alamos National Laboratory; M Mendillo, Boston University

SM21A-01 INVITED   09:05h

Space Weather

* Lanzerotti, L J (ljl@njit.edu) , New Jersey Institute of Technology, Department of Physics, Newark, NJ 07901 United States
* Lanzerotti, L J (ljl@njit.edu) , Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ 07974 United States

Following James Van Allen's discovery of Earth's radiation belts (1958), it was immediately recognized that the space environment would be hostile to the communications satellites that had been envision by Arthur Clark (1945) and John Pierce (1955). Van Allen's discovery set off a burst of "space weather" research and engineering that continues to today, paralleling "space weather" research that had, prior to 1958, been directed toward understanding environment effects on cable and early wireless communications, electric power distribution, and pipelines. Van Allen's discovery also meant that the flight of humans above the sensible atmosphere would be fraught with more peril than mere weightlessness. This Van Allen lecture will discuss the space weather considerations that arose from Van Allen's discovery as well as space weather effects that occur from numerous other physical processes in the complex sun-heliosphere-magnetosphere environmental system.

Cite abstracts as: Authors (2005), Title, Eos. Trans. AGU, 86(18), Jt. Assem. Suppl., Abstract #####-##.