New Solar Prediction System Gives Time to Prepare for the 2012 Storms Ahead!
This is my thoughts about this. If someone is spending this kind of money they must take this “solar storm threat” really serious. A new method of predicting solar storms that could help to avoid widespread power and communications blackouts costing billions of pounds has been launched by researchers at the University of Bradford.
Solar storms involve the release of huge amounts of hot gas and magnetic forces from the surface of the sun into space at around a million miles an hour. The next major solar storms are expected in 2012-13 as part of the sun’s 11-year weather cycle. A 2008 US National Academy of Sciences report estimated that modern reliance on electronics and satellite communications means a major storm could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina. Although major solar eruptions (coronal mass ejections) normally take several days to reach the Earth, the largest recorded in 1859 took just eighteen hours. Solar flares which can also cause significant disruption to communications systems take just a few minutes. So advance warning is of vital importance to enable steps to be taken to avoid the worst effects of solar activity. Up to now, solar weather prediction has been done manually, with experts looking at 2D satellite images of the sun and assessing the likelihood of future activity. But the team from the University of Bradford’s Center for Visual Computing have created the first online automated prediction system, using 3D images generated from the joint NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory satellite (SOHO). The system can be seen at work at
http://spaceweather.inf.brad.ac.uk
Already in use by both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), the Bradford Automated Solar Activity Prediction system (ASAP) identifies and classifies sun spots and then feeds this information through a model which can predict the likelihood of solar flares. The system is able to accurately predict a solar flare six hours in advance and the team are working to achieve a similar accuracy for the prediction of major solar eruptions in the near future. Reader in Visual Computing, Dr Rami Qahwaji, who led the EPSRC-funded research, says: “Solar weather prediction is still very much in its infancy, probably at about the point that normal weather forecasting was around 50 years ago.
“However, our system is a major step forward. By creating an automated system that can work in real time, we open up the possibility for much faster prediction and with sufficient data prediction of a wider range of activity. With NASA’s new Solar Dynamic Observatory satellite which came into operation in May, we have the chance to see the sun’s activity in much greater detail which will further improve our prediction capabilities.”
The ASAP model is based on historical data which was analyzed to identify patterns in the sun’s activity. Dr Qahwaji is now applying for more funding to further improve the system and ensure it can be adapted to work with the latest sun monitoring satellites.
Dr. Rami Qahwaji (CEng) got his BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Mustansiriyah (Baghdad) in 1994 and his MSc in Control and Computer Engineering from the same university in 1997. He got his PhD in computer Vision systems in 2002 from Bradford University. He is currently a Reader in Visual Computing at the School of Computing, Informatics and Media. His research expertise include: 2D/3D image processing, machine learning and the design of machine vision systems. He has publications in the fields of solar imaging, space weather, medical imaging, biometrics and face recognition, morphological transforms, statistical classifiers and neural networks, security and watermarking.
