HR: 1330h
AN: ED13B-03    [Abstracts]
TI: Synoptic examples of solar-terrestrial storming events for space weather education
AU: * Habash Krause, L
EM: linda.krause@usafa.af.mil
AF: US Air Force Academy, HQ USAFA/DFP 2354 Fairchild Dr, Suite 2A31, USAF Academy, CO 80840 United States
AU: Knipp, D J
EM: delores.knipp@usafa.af.mil
AF: US Air Force Academy, HQ USAFA/DFP 2354 Fairchild Dr, Suite 2A31, USAF Academy, CO 80840 United States
AB: With the ever-growing dependence on space based systems as part of modern society's day-to-day infrastructure, space weather courses are playing an increasingly important role in many educational venues. Because courses of this nature are often conducted as survey courses, bounding the scope and the level of depth of material to be covered in any given course remains a challenge. Often students may "lose the forest for the trees;" that is, they may focus on the details of individual processes to the point where it is difficult to grasp the connections between processes that are germane to a complete understanding of space weather. With this paper, the authors present a set of examples of candidate storms that we believe are effective at tying together storms on the sun with those in the near-earth space environment and the resulting space weather effects on manmade systems. We propose that it would be most appropriate to present these so-called synoptic storm studies toward the end of the course. The idea is to build on the understanding of specific processes that have been learned throughout the course. Each study would begin with a storm on the sun, and then progress through the modification of the solar wind due to the solar storm, then the interaction between the solar wind and the earth's magnetosphere, ionosphere, upper atmosphere, and then finally any ground-based processes. The study would conclude with the effects on man-made systems. The candidate studies that will be covered in the talk include the May 1989 storm that resulted in massive power outages in Canada, the May 1998 compound storm, and the October 2004 Halloween storms that produced the largest x-ray flares on record to date.
DE: 0810 Post-secondary education
DE: 2700 MAGNETOSPHERIC PHYSICS
DE: 6900 RADIO SCIENCE
DE: 7800 SPACE PLASMA PHYSICS
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: 2005 Joint Assembly