 Hello everyone, from wherever you're joining. Thank you so much for being here today for this NCAR Explorer Series conversation from numbers to images, Visualizing Space Weather with Dr. Michael Wilsberger. My name is Dr. Abby McCumber and I am an educational designer for the NCAR Explorer Series. The National Center for Atmospheric Research or NCAR is a world leading organization dedicated to understanding earth system science including our atmosphere, weather, climate, the sun and the importance of all of these systems to our society. I am really glad to be with all y'all today. For this conversation, we will take questions at the end but please definitely submit any questions you might have during the talk using the Slido platform. If you scroll down this webpage you can see the Slido window just below where you are seeing the livestream video of this event. If you haven't already, go ahead and click on the green join event button and then you can ask questions on the Q&A tab and answer poll questions on the poll staff both of which are found in that blue bar across the top and definitely be sure to join Slido to add your thoughts to our word cloud question. What do you think of when you hear space weather? Because we are going to get to that really soon. This conversation is also being recorded and will be available on the NCAR Explorer series website. With us today, we have NCAR scientist, Dr. Michael Wiltberger. Dr. Michael Wiltberger is the deputy director of the high altitude observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Prior to that, he served as the head of geospatial section in the atmospheric and geospatial science division at the National Science Foundation. His main area of research is the modeling of the magnetosphere and its interaction with the solar wind and couple thermosphere ionosphere system. Dr. Wiltberger earned his bachelor's degree in physics from Clarkson University and his PhD in space plasma physics from the University of Maryland College Park. Amongst his many scientific accomplishments are pioneering work on the inclusion of ionospheric flow outflow and the application of advanced statistical analysis in global models and ground breaking results, proving the connection between localized reconnection and the so-called bursary bulk flows in higher resolution simulations of the magnetotail. During his career, Dr. Wiltberger also has served in many important community functions, including as chair of the GEM steering committee, vice chair of the AMS science and technology committee on space weather, and as vice chair of the solar wind magnetosphere and interactions panel of the 2010 NRC Decadal Survey for solar and space physics. Mike, can you turn your camera on and give a quick hello before we check out the work club? Hi, Abby. Is everything working all right? Yeah, everything's doing great. How are you doing? I'm good. I don't know if I can live up to that intro, but I'll try. Well, we're gonna do this and it's all going to be great. Are you excited to talk about space weather? Yes, of course I am. Okay, so now before I turn this over to our speaker, let's check out your thoughts on our work cloud. Paul and Brett, would you share a slider for us? Let's see, oh, what do they think about space weather? The sun, yes. Ah, Dr. Wiltberger, there's someone who thinks about you in this. So how do you think our audience did with that answer for space weather? I think they did really great. There's lots of key things in there. The imminent peril is a little concerning, but maybe not imminent, but certainly some challenges that come from space weather. And I think there might be a few of my family members out there. That's probably why the Dr. Michael Wiltberger is showing up in there. Yeah, my nephew, there you go. See, I told you, there's some family in the audience. I mean, family's always important, okay? Indeed. Mike, I think we're all familiar with weather and earth. Like, I am familiar with hurricanes, I am familiar with storms, we have drought, but what exactly is space weather? So space weather is an encompassing term that we use to talk about the processes that are happening in the near-earth space environment. They all originate on the sun, and we have analogs to hurricanes that are called coronal mass ejections that come through interplanetary space and impact the area around the earth. We call geospase or the magnetosphere as it was in my introduction there. And we have those impacts on our technologies, satellites that we have, the long line power lines that are around, and communications. We talk about technology now, we get more dependent on it, but actually there were impacts for space weather dating back to the 1800s and long telegraph lines. Hey, okay. So before I ask you another question, I just want to make sure that our audience is looking at Slido and answering those questions because the upcoming Slido question is one that I am very intrigued about, which is how can scientists study space weather? So please make sure that you're answering all of those questions. One thing that you just mentioned was something called the geospase system. Can you please define it for our audience and tell me and us why it's so important to study it? Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, the geospase is the near-earth space environment that we have out there, sort of out to the orbit of the moon, maybe a little bit further beyond that that we're talking about. And in collaboration with colleagues that I have at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, we recently received funding from NASA for a project that we're calling the Center for Geospase Stores. And what we're working on there is to develop numerical models to tell us what is going on in the geospase environment as these big solar storms come and impact the earth. I was told that you had a video that you wanna show us about space weather. I do. So let me pop up my first animation here and let's do the screen sharing. Go first movie coming up. So this is an animation that was produced by the teams at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. And it shows right here at the beginning, and we've got the surface of the sun, the undulating surface of the sun with the little dark sun spots that are over there. And then right about now we're gonna see a solar flare occurring and then the release of the coronal mass ejection, a big massive ball of hot ionized gas that we call plasma that has a magnetic field embedded in it. And then that is gonna come and interact with the geospase environment, this area that you see here with the earth's magnetic field being squished on the day side, energy and plasma being deposited down into the night side of the system, what we call the magnetotail. Very magnetic reconnection occurs within that process. Particles get ejected down the field lines and light up the aurora borealis, one of the other fascinating aspects of space weather, perhaps one of the most beautiful aspects of space weather. I'm gonna stop my screen chair and pop my face back on the screen. Yeah, so was that an animation without a visualization? What was that? Yeah, so that was the work of a talented team of artists working in collaboration with the scientists to produce an animation, a cartoon if you will, telling us a little bit of what's going out there to get the basic concepts of what's going on and eruption in a flare on the sun, the CME propagating through space, interaction with the earth's magnetic field, but it's just an animation. It's just a cartoon depiction of it. It tells us the aspects of what's going on, but it isn't a real rendering of output from a numerical model, for example. Okay, so before we move on, I just wanna see what our audience thinks about, how can scientists study space weather? Yes, you are going to talk to us about that in a second. So if you could tell me, ooh, let's see through satellites, remote sensing. There's a lot of remote sensing. How do we feel about that? Yeah, these are some really good answers in coming into play there. Satellites certainly play a key role and remote sensing is cameras and other things looking at the sun, the processes that are coming on there. We also actually have in situ or being like a buoy in the stream measuring the waves that are coming in. We have a satellite just upstream of the earth that tells us what the direction of the magnetic field is gonna be in the solar wind and how hot and how fast that ball of gas that's exploding in the CME is coming at the earth and lets us know a little bit of advanced warning about what we're gonna experience in any upcoming geomagnetic storm or geospatial storm. And there were other good things on there, magnetometers in the ground, cameras, satellites. The one thing I didn't see on there is the way I used to study space weather and that's through numerical simulations, models, data, there it is. I just needed to scroll further down. Funding is the main requirement, there you go. Yeah, I do like to get paid. So yes, funding is an important aspect of being able to study space weather. But as I was saying, the key way that I do and the folks that work with me study space weather is through the development of numerical space weather models. And just like the analogy that we were talking about in the beginning of numerical weather prediction that tells you whether it's gonna rain tomorrow, whether it's gonna be a big snowstorm, we're working on the development of numerical weather models to tell us what's gonna happen in the space environment and provide information for the impacts that we can see coming out of that. And in fact, oh, go ahead. Yes, you're gonna tell me something. No, I was gonna ask you if there were any projects that we're trying to address, how we study storms in space if we cannot see them. So it's like you were reading my mind. Right, I'm just gonna say, I'm reading your mind. I have, you're right. One of the real challenges for what we're doing is being able to visualize that. There's some remote sensing, you can see the aurora from space and you can see the aurora sometimes from the space station. There's some of the really cool videos out there for that online. But getting that global view, global picture of the geospatial system of the magnetosphere is a real challenge. And that's where the output of the numerical models, the numerical weather prediction models that I did work on in developing come in handy. And so why don't I go to my next video that shows a little bit of what the magnetosphere looks like. And so I will share that in just a second here. There we go. That's coming through okay, right? Perfect. So this is gonna be an animation driven by the actual data, the numerical data from our computer codes that are solving the physical equations that describe the system. And what you're seeing in this animation is that artist lines being turned into real renderings going on there. The earth magnetic field on the day side is getting squished by the solar wind flow. The flow is interacting with a long edge there, creating lots of little turbulence at eddies along the side that comes into play. I'll play it again here just to make it come and play. We're seeing some magnetic reconnection on the day side, some eddies evolving and then you're gonna see some magnetic reconnection happening down in that distant tail region and the flows that are coming into play there. The plane that you're seeing that's in sort of green and purple is the earth's magnetic field with the earth's dipole subtracted off. So you can see where it squished in on the day side and stretched out on the night side. And then the other cut plane that's coming up out through the center of the earth is telling us about the strength of the currents that are flowing in there where there's bends and kinks in the field lines. We see a lot more current coming into play. All right, I guess I should stop sharing that one so we can get back to questions. No, this is great. But once again, it's like you're reading my mind. I was just told that we have some questions from the audience. So let's see. Ha-ha. Do aurora formation affect temperature of the lower atmosphere? They were paying attention. You mentioned the aurora, so it's all clicking. It is indeed all clicking and the energetic particles that are flowing down along the field lines do interact with the particles in the upper levels of the atmosphere. And they do heat that region of the atmosphere up and can affect the orbits of satellites. But that's happening at hundreds of kilometers up out into space and the gas is pretty rarefied up there. So there are not any significant impacts on the lower atmospheric temperature from the aurora. Great, okay, okay. So let's see. Huh, let's see. What are the current, oh, this one is actually, yeah. I was trying to figure out which one I wanted to ask more. They're both so good. If the sun has coronal mass ejections, does that mean that someday it will run out of energy? Well, the sun will someday run out of energy and but that someday is way, way, way, way billions and billions and billions of years in the future. And the coronal mass ejections are part of the losses of material and matter on the sun. But actually there's always stuff coming off of the surface of the sun. It's called the solar wind and it's blowing out into space and sort of filling it up with the rarefied gases and that's contributing to the evolution of the sun. But fundamentally it's the processes that are happening down interior of the sun, the nuclear fusion that's going on there that'll eventually slow down and stop. See, and the last question we have for right now. Maybe, we'll see. Maybe. Oh, there's a lot of questions. Oh, this is the question from Muhammad. Yeah, so this is a great question and it was what I was gonna ask you. So, Muhammad, thank you. Could you please explain how these animations are made? And they're asking something that is a little bit more complicated than I would have asked, which is which software is used to make it? Yes, so thanks for that insightful question there. To answer the second question first because it's actually quote unquote easier, we use a program called ParaView, which is a visualization tool that was developed by I think the Department of Energy. But what it is doing is we run this numerical simulation and so throughout the entire volume of space, 30 times the radius of the earth up into the solar wind and 300 times the radius of the earth down into the tail and about a hundred times in Y and Z. In that entire space, we have a whole hundreds and hundreds of grid points in the simulation. And at each point, we know how much material is there, how hot the material is there, how what direction it is flowing and what the magnetic field is in that. We bring that all that data into the ParaView visualization program and are able to slice it and dice it and do different things with it. So we slice it and are able to color it with the colors of the magnetic field. We can look at where the currents are growing there. And then we're able to trace magnetic field lines, which are those green and blue things that I'm pointing to on my screen because I still have the movie up, but nobody else can see that. So that's not too helpful, but then we'd be able to remember the movie that I showed earlier and then what was going on from in that perspective. So hopefully that gives Muhammad a high level answer to what he was going to after with his question. Why does it think that we have talked about that the audience doesn't know that we have talked about? Is that there is a collaboration between NCAR, the High Altitude Observatory and a few places to develop new numerical models to understand and predict space weather. Could you please talk to us a little bit about that Center for Geospatstorm project? Yeah, right. So the Center for Geospatstorms, as my background shows here, is a NASA funded center to study the developed numerical models for the nearest space environment, the geospatial region. It's a collaboration between NCAR HAO and led by my friend and colleague, Slava Merkin at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. And then we have collaborators at a bunch of different universities, UCLA, Rice, some private companies, Cintak. And I'm sure I'm leaving somebody off, so I'm making the Academy Award faux pas of not having a list in front of me. And I apologize to anybody who the institution I've forgotten on the list there, but it's a great group of scientists that are working to develop these new models and really use the models to probe the fundamental science of what's going on in the geospatial system. So you showed us a video that had an amazing visualization that you made. And in a few seconds, we are going to talk a little bit about how you can build them. In the meantime, I also want to remind our audience that we're going to discuss how much data goes into a visualization. So please make sure that you have answered that slider question. So let's move on and talk a little bit about how do we build visualizations using data? So when we talk about data, it may be very difficult to imagine the amount of information that you need to put in there. So before you tell me the correct answer, I want to see how much data our audience thinks that it's going to be involved in creating that typical visualization. So if I can please see the slider, Paul. Whoa! Three terabytes, 50 gigs, 100 megabytes. Okay, so our audience is spot on. But could you help us, please put those numbers into context, like how big are we talking about? Right, so of course the size of the visual, the data that we're talking about depends on the resolution that we're using to do our simulation, but we can do really good stuff with three terabytes of output. And that's a sizable fraction of your hard drive or a fraction of the hard drive for what you're getting there. It's more data than you can put onto your phone, right? You get a couple hundred gigabytes on your phone, but you can get it onto a computer there. We do really, really high resolution simulations. We can push that up into the hundreds of terabytes and maybe even into the petabyte range down the line with the new big computer that's coming into NCAR that we're super excited to play with. So you told me that 500 kilobytes, if I am not mistaken, so please correct me if I make this up. It is about how much data was required to send a mission to the moon. And right now we're working with like three terabytes. How have we gone from like needing so little information to needing so much to make a great visualization? Yeah, so actually the numbers for the memory of the Apollo guidance computer were actually measured in words. And so it wasn't even less than 500 kilobytes of data for what the memory was for the guidance computer on the Apollo spacecraft. And so you've got a couple of hundred gigabytes, thousands and thousands of times more memory available to you on your phone. The question you might wanna ask yourself is, are you doing anything as important as going to the moon with your phone? But I'll leave that as an unanswerable question for the audience to think about that comes into play. The question you didn't ask me about how do we get so much data coming out and how do we do that? It's what we're able to do with the incredible advances that have happened with computing power since we've gone to the moon and beyond, right? You know, the first computers, the first supercomputers were running and doing weather prediction models here at NCAR. And they have grown by leaps and bounds and orders of magnitude since then because of the increasing computing power in there known as Moore's Law for the doubling that comes into play. And of course, you give a scientist the ability to get more resolution to probe it further and we're gonna run it right up to the max and see what we can get out of it. And that's where we're going with it and we get lots of data coming out from it from that perspective. This may be similar to something you answered before, but what are some things that you are thinking about or what techniques are you using to create a visualization? Yeah, so I touched a little bit on that to the answer to Mohamed's question. And what I'm gonna do here actually is I'm going to pop up my next movie because I'm gonna be able to use that to talk a little bit about what we're seeing, what we're going after in sort of the considerations that come into play here. So I'm gonna deviate just a little bit and it is going from that. So this is another animation that I, or scientific visualization that I developed to do some studies of the flows that are happening in the portion of the earth on the night side that we call the magnetotail. And the considerations that we're wanting to look at here, we wanted to be able to understand the changes and the perturbations that were happening in the magnetic field around the earth. And we wanted to know where it was deviating from the sort of the normal dipole that happens that comes out of the earth that makes your compass work, right? Makes the compass points to the north pole. And on the day side, the solar wind is blowing in and it's squishing the field together and it's compressing it. And so we wanted to be able to show that compression. We needed a color table or color process that tells you something about compression. So you use that green portion of the color table to show you where the field is compressed but it's also gonna get stretched out on the night side in another reason. So we needed another colors to tell us where it's stretched out. So we wanted to be able to use that color that goes from purple to white and then over to green to be able to show us the stretching and compression that happens in the magnetosphere as it's going forward with it. But there's more going on in the system than just the changes in the magnetic field. The plasma is flowing, it's moving. And I wanna be able to see and understand where those flows are happening, where the impacts and information is propagating through the system. So what you see in that little background right there are right now just a bunch of little dots that are maybe a little bit hard to see but if you look down here in the corner there, you see those dots are actually little arrows and the little arrows are set up to tell us which direction the flow is happening and in that region they're flowing back down the tail there and the length of the arrow is also telling us how strong the flow is happening there. But that can be a little hard to see especially when sometimes when the arrows are pointing around. So to make that a little bit more visually appealing and to help people understand what's going on with the intensity of the flow, I color each of those arrows with another color table that goes from this sort of yellow, red, orange into red, kind of a burning color table. The more orange it is, the brighter it's burning, the stronger that flow is, that's happening in the system itself. And so this is for a study that I did, this is actually a movie that's done a scientific journal article. Scientific journals have gotten to the point where you can actually attach the movies that we produce and have it be part of the paper that comes into play here. So I'm going to let this play and it's a little bit slower than what you're seeing there but the interplanetary magnetic field turns southward. The energy is being deposited in the system. We're seeing little vortices happening along the edges and as it evolves, looking way down in the tail we're going to see flows coming in that are bursting in and getting fairly narrow and propagating inward and evolving and changing in direction and moving around in the system itself. And then there's burst of energy that come in and vary as the input goes for it there. And so the visualization is trying to tell us comprehensively what's going on in the system and the variations that are occurring in a way that I think is visually appealing but also visually informative, right? We know where the intensities of the fields are changing, where fields getting compressed, where fields getting stretched and how those field stretches and compressions relate to the flows that are happening that are occurring in the system. So bringing all these techniques together helps us to understand and create the scientific visualization that goes beyond just the cartoon animation that we were talking about at the beginning or the overview visualization that was in my second movie. So I will stop sharing that and let the conversation flow. Yeah, no, that's really like a very interesting visualization. And hearing you go through the process of how you assign certain colors, it's very, very interesting. How does having those visualizations help people like you do science? How can you have that and say, whoa? Right, yes. So yeah, thanks for that interesting thing. And like all artists do, what you're seeing is the result of lots and lots of iteration, right? I tried something, it didn't work. I tried a different color table. It wasn't helping me see what I needed to see. And so you get eventually to a point where you are able to get this kind of global perspective that comes into play. And one of the things that looking at that initial movie was able to do for me was to able to see that the flows weren't happening in a straight line, they were evolving. They were changing their direction. They were coming back and forth in the interactions that were happening there. And when we observe the system currently with satellites, we only have one or two little satellite missions out there at a time or maybe a handful for some of the more recent things that come into play. So being able to understand how a single dabble of data point fits into the interconnection of what was happening further back that may have actually not been directly behind it, may have been coming from somewhere, somewhere off the line helps evolve that understanding. And so then I was able to use the visualization to isolate individual points, extract more data and understand the connections in the interplay that were happening in there and be able to prove that the features, the fronts that we were seeing in that simulation correspond to what satellites are seeing if they look at large numbers of these things over time. So you are able to bring space to your hands and just manipulate it to understand what is happening. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, bring space to my hands and manipulate it and I can move it up and down and slice and dice it from different directions and be able to see what gems are hidden inside the simulation results. Right. One last question, which is like, what data did you need to create that visualization? So the simulation uses observations from the buoy that I talked about earlier in between the earth and the sun to tell us how hard the solar wind is flowing, what direction the magnetic field is and how much of it is there. We feed that in as an input to the simulation and then we crank up thousands of cores of computing power and let it run for hours and hours and hours and it spits out the terabytes of data that tell us about the density of the material, the flow, strength and direction, how hot it is and what the magnetic field is direction in the points throughout there and then I'm able to create the slice and dice cut planes and whatnot using the Parabue tool. Okay. Before I take questions from the audience, I also want to remind that we have one more slide or question that we're going to go through. So please make sure you answer that. That one is legitimately my favorite one out of all of the ones we are asking. But let's bring up two audience questions that we have. See. So this one, you mentioned current. How much current is flowing from these charged particles over what volume of space? Yeah, so that's a great question. And it depends on which region of space that we're talking about but the currents that are flowing down along the field lines that are creating the aurora borealis and closing through that region there. They're measured in mega amps. So there's a lot of current flowing there. There's a lot of energy that's coming into that system. There are different regions in space that have different intensities but that's one area that gets kind of there. And I was told there was one more. Cool. Yeah. Ooh. What does an ideal visualization tool look like for you? What features and capabilities would you like the software to have to analyze data, space, weather data? Ooh. So that's a darn good question. An ideal visualization is a, one I haven't really thought about trying to figure out the answer to but I think the ideal visualization is the one that can clearly and most concisely show the information about what I'm trying to get after. So if I'm trying to understand the flow structure it needs to be able to illuminate that. If I want to understand how the magnetic field lines are changing or evolving, I need to be able to see those field lines and what comes into play there. The key features, the second part of that question there about what are the key features that make that happen and make that possible, you wanna be able to have the software be able to read in the terabytes of data fairly quickly and create what we call a rendering, a view of the data that we have there. And then you wanna be able to manipulate the direction you're looking at, right? I wanna look at it from the left. I wanna look at it from the right. I wanna look at it from down below so I can see what changes are occurring there. So it's gotta have the ability to change that camera view and perspective. And then I need to be able to slice and cut it through any which way and any which direction that comes into play and block the parameters that are needed to understand that. How hot it is, how much is there, where's it going? Those kinds of fundamental things that come into play. And there's a lot of great tools out there for doing that and per view is just one of them. It's one that I know and so I use it a fair amount. That was such a great question. We have been talking a lot about visualizations but we have not started talking about how being able to have those visualizations help us on earth. So what effects can solar storms have on earth and earth society? Yeah, so there are a variety of effects that come into play for space weather on earth and in the near earth environment. I mentioned a few of them earlier on. The one that related to the question that came from one of the earlier folks there, the Aurora, the energy that comes in heats up the ionosphere and thermosphere. You're heating it up, you're making the gas expand, that gas is expanding into the orbits where the satellites are and you can create satellite drag and change the orbital characteristics that come into play that happens there. That energy comes in, it creates ionization that affects the ability of radio waves to communicate through there. So you can have impacts on communication and satellite navigation for GPSs. And then coming back to the last question that was asked about the currents that are flowing. Those currents that are flowing, the mega amps of currents and the field of line currents that are flowing from the magnetosphere down into the near earth, into the ionosphere, thermosphere, close through there. And you may remember back from your high school physics class or maybe your college physics class, I know it's getting scary here, right? But when there's a current flowing, there's also a magnetic field that it's created by the current flows. And those magnetic field changes and whatnot can have impacts on power grids and the long lines of the power grids that are part of what we have here. And in fact, if you want, I can show you a little visualization we've done to get into that. The next animation that I have here is coming up in just a second. I just got to get to the share. So this animation that we're seeing or visualization that we're seeing here is showing the earth in three different views. So the top view is showing us, we'll be showing us what the changes are for the magnetic field that is coming from the currents that are flowing that we were talking about earlier there. Those magnetic fields can interact with the solid rocks of the earth, the conductivity of the earth and create electric fields. And then those electric fields in turn can impact the power grid and the last line, the last plot that you see there shows the long lines of the power grid that is used to transmit power throughout the United States. And so this is a simulation that we did with our code looking at the impact of what would have happened if there had been a really big coronal mass ejection from the sun propagating through the interplanetary space and impacting the earth. This actually was a, the data from this is actually from a real event that happened, but it was observed by a spacecraft that was off to the side of the earth. So this event didn't hit the earth, but it gives us some kind of ground truth of what a really big event would be like to feed into the simulation. So with that, let me start things playing here. And so time's evolving in the top there. You're gonna see shortly some evolution of the changes in the magnetic field coming into play. And then the little light up of the green electric field, green to yellow electric fields in the Midwest of the United States and then along the East coast. And where those electric fields are strongest there, you can see it driving geomagnetically induced currents of GICs in the long line power grid lines that come into play that happens there in it. And that's a significant impact. And it's a really interesting combination of physics that's coming into play. So it's the physics that I do for the space weather and understanding the top panel, the magnetic field that comes into play. But then I got to talk to the geologists and get data from the US Geological Survey to understand what the conductivity of the earth is like. What do the rocks do and how well do they allow the electric field to propagate? And it turns out Wisconsin's got some really old and conductive rocks in it right there. So that's why Wisconsin lights up a bit. And then there's also a bit more, you know, connectivity in the East coast, in that New York, Washington DC corridor that comes into play. And then we got to talk to the power grid folks and get information about what the power grid is and where those field, where those power lines are aligned and being able to understand the length and structure that comes into play to be able to calculate a proxy for that magnetic field or excuse me, that current that's flowing in those power lines that can lead to challenges for the power grid. There have been in the past disruptions to the power grid famous event that everybody talks about is in March of 1989 where there were disruptions in the Hydro-Coback power grid that led to outages and cascade failures through there. There was a big storm in 2003 that didn't have any impacts in the US power grid but did create some interesting disruptions in the Baltic region and also some disruptions in South Africa. Should I play it one more time or should we... Hold on to that thought because I'm going to ask that we share the Slido answers about the energy released from the solar flare because I think we can call back to that map and just see what it says. So the energy released from the solar flare which is what I think that visualization was getting at that caused the largest recorded solar storm on earth was equivalent to and the correct answer is 10 billion atomic bombs which is the scariest number to me but what I get from your video is that we will be fine based on that visualization that we could possibly handle it because we have models that help us understand that is that correct based on that video? Yeah, we will be fine. We might have some challenges. We might have some disruptions that we need to deal with but the 10 billion atomic bombs is the energy being released in that solar flare and not all of that energy is going to be coming directly to earth and not all of it is going to be impacting us here but it could cause some significant challenges to what we do here and that's part of why space weather is one of the items that's in the Homeland Security National Risk Register or working in the government and agencies and folks like us in NKARA working to understand that, to create better predictions to be able to help us be prepared in the event of a major space weather event. Brings me to trying to communicate with people and explaining all of the science to people because as a scientist we know that one of the biggest challenges is being able to take all of the information that we are given, interpret it and then effectively communicate with all audiences. And I know that you have used some tools so could you tell us what tools have you used in order to communicate all of this information that you get from visualizations to the general public? Yeah, so that is one of the real challenges in science. We have this tendency to be able to fall back on our equations and our complicated terminology which we need to be able to talk to each other and understand the precise and subtle differences that come into play. But we also really want to be able to have everybody have a grasp and an understanding of what we're doing and the beauty and majesty of what we're coming after in that. And my colleagues at the Center for Geospaced Storms developed a collaboration with some artists that were working on a show called Worlds Beyond Earth that premiered at the Hayden Planetarium. But as I understand it now is being released in more broadly and it's available at maybe at a planetarium near you. I went to the Aaron Space Museum last weekend with my cousin and it was showing and available there. So you may be able to see that. And what I want to show you in this last thing is kind of coming back full circle of what we were doing at the beginning, right? I showed you an animation and artists rendering of what was kind of going on in the nearer space environment. And the artists worked together with my colleagues at the Center to produce this next video that shows what you can do when you join art and science together. So let me bring up the last video here. And this is from that show. What you're looking at here is a view coming in, zooming in on Earth. The white lines that you see there are various orbits of objects. The big object that you see, the white line that you see there is the orbit of the moon. And then here comes the data from the simulation that we had provided to them. And you can see that the variations that are coming into play, they did a coloring of the field lines and has the intensity that comes into play. You can see this big storm evolving and coming through there. The field lines are opening up as we zoom in. And as we zoom in closer, we get to view the techno spheres, what they called it, the satellites in and around the Earth. The big ring that you see there is geostationary orbit, the orbit where the period matches the orbit of the Earth. But then you get closer to the Earth and you got all these satellites that are in low Earth orbit, the Starlink satellites, the other satellites that are providing observations and whatnot. And you can just kind of get a feel for how many spacecraft are out there and how exposed the techno sphere, the technology that we live in is to the space environment. And that's the need to be able to provide your really good and compelling space weather forecasts. Okay. Turns out that asking about atomic bombs makes people think about danger. So we have a few questions about dangers that I think it's best to do now since we're so close to the atomic bombs. So if we could please bring those up. Ah, there we go. What are possible dangers to society from space weather? Yeah, so thanks, Robert, for that question. And the dangers range from the small and annoying to the disruptions to communications. There can actually also be disruptions to the GPS signal that can lead to errors in navigation. There's a lot we could do to engineer around that, but it's certainly something that comes into play. But the variations that we talked about in the magnetic field and the nearest space environment can charge up what are known as the radiation belts, the energetic particles that are trapped in that magnetic field. And changes in those radiation belts can impact the satellites. And then we get closer down into the earth and the challenges to the power grid come into play and then it impacts from space weather that happened on that side of things. Okay, let's see if there's another question. Maybe. Nope, there were, oh, there you go. Oh, yeah, huh. That last thing sounds familiar, but can you tell us anything about the Carrington event of 1869? Yeah, so thanks, that would be my aunt. So thanks my aunt Peggy for that question. And yeah, the Carrington event of 1869 is actually one of the biggest known events of a coronal mass ejection and a storm that happened on the sun that propagated. And Carrington was a solar astronomer that had a telescope observing on it. And he actually saw the bright white flare that happened with the flare release and then that CME propagated through interplanetary space and impacted the earth. And there was actually observations of the changes in the magnetic field that we're seeing at a magnetometer that was operating in Bombay, India. And that's one of the biggest events that we know about. And we kind of use that as a touchstone in planning and thinking about what could be the impacts of a similar event on our modern society. Ooh, Robert has all the questions and they're all great. What kinds of satellites upstream from earth give us warnings of incoming CMEs? So there's two classes, broadly speaking, I'm gonna say there's two classes of satellites, there's two classes of observations that we use to give us of warnings of CMEs. We use one class of satellites that has what's called a coronagraph. And you can think about that as an instrument that makes a permanent eclipse. So we stick a little thing in there that blocks out the most of the light of the sun so we can see the outside portions of the sun where the solar wind is flowing, the corona, that's the name corona graph that comes into play. And when a solar flare and CME happens, we can actually see the perturbation, the density that's happening in it from that. So that gives us a little bit of information that a big event just happened on the sun and that it could be propagating towards us. We can use the observations of how fast it's moving in the camera images to give us a rough idea of when it's going to arrive at the earth. And then when it gets closer to the earth, we have a category of in situ is the word I use, the big fancy Latin word that just means actually being in there and measuring it. And there's a probe, there are a variety of spacecraft that do it, the advanced composition explorer ACE and then one that's operated by NOAA that's the Discover satellite. And basically you can think about it as having a compass, a magnetic field detector on it that tells us which direction the magnetic field is inside this big coronal mass ejection. And then a couple of other instruments that tell us how much material there is and how fast it's flowing. And that combination of stuff tells us a little bit and then it's our buoy, it's our warning buoy in space that tells us what's coming in for these things. Typically a CME could take about one to three days depending on how big it is to propagate the millions of miles from the sun to the earth. That buoy, the ACE satellite that we talk about is only about 45 minutes ahead of time. So we only get a very little bit of warning from that buoy in space. Okay, to continue on with the theme of for all mass ejections. If the sun has coronal mass ejections. We already did this one. Oh, yeah, we did do that one. We will not run out of energy now, but future as well. So speaking of communication, could you recommend resources for the general public that would allow one to better understand the NOAA space weather forecasts? So great question that comes into play that actually on the NOAA website, if you Google the Space Weather Prediction Center or SWPSI, they have a great webpage that talks about the forecasts that they put out and that has information about what they have a variety of scales that go from one to five and what the magnitudes and impacts of things are gonna be. As you might guess, one is pretty low and five is pretty hard or pretty bad or can be potentially pretty bad. We have lots of questions coming in. So let's just keep going. Yes, I only have one more question for you at the end. So yeah, I'm a physics student and a musician planning to study the ionosphere and the sounds of make superior art and science. Any recent studies or thoughts? DeSiphany, that's a great question. And there's a new emerging area of trying to understand our data that's called soundification. And basically it's taking the data and turning it into sound waves, into tones that we can understand in here. And in the plasma physics field, there's a lot of this because a lot of ways that we observed it or one of the early ways that we observed it was through radio waves. And we could hear these what were kind of called whistler tones and they would go, little whistler waves that kind of came to them. It sounded like somebody was whistling. And so being able to turn that information and turning it into sound and understanding of it from that perspective is one of the new ways that people are thinking about understanding the data. I haven't done a lot with it, but I've seen some really exciting stuff that comes into play there. And it's an interesting way to be able to look at time series information, right? Your ear can hear lots of things and be able to detect the patterns. And so that combination that you're talking about about the music and the physics coming into play is a fascinating new area for understanding the data that we're producing and observing for our systems. Okay. How long does it take to crunch the number for a visualization? It depends on how big of a computer you give me and how big the simulation is, but it can take for some of these final renderings, it can take anywhere from a few hours to overnight. Sometimes I submit a job for the highest resolution rendering. I submit a job to the supercomputer and go eat my dinner and come back the next day and look at the results. Ooh. Are you building a numerical space weather prediction model? And how many hours we can forecast priori? So I'm gonna assume they wanna know how much advanced lead time that we can get from some of our forecasts. So yes, we're working on building a numerical model. Our primary focus is on understanding the science and the interactions that are going on in this complicated system. But others of my colleagues throughout the field have developed numerical models that are currently being used in the Space Weather Prediction Center for doing forecasts of what kind of impacts that are gonna come into play. To drive those models, a large portion of them are limited by that upwind buoy in the solar wind that I talked about earlier. And so we can get about 45 minutes lead time from that. We can make some guesses for what might be happening based on the coronal mass ejection images, the pictures that we were using to get a little bit further out, but the fidelity of those forecasts isn't as high as what we would get from that measurement in space, because we really don't know what direction the magnetic field is inside that, and understanding that's really one of the key fundamental challenges of the science and our uncertainties about how fast and how strong it's flowing are also pretty broad from those simulations. Ooh, with SPD 41, will you be releasing all of your simulation code as open source? And if so, where? Yeah, so for those of you that aren't in the know, Space Policy Directive 41 is what SPD 41 talks about, and that is a mandate from the highest levels of the government in Tenassa, so that the scientific codes that we produce to do that are in fact being able to be released in sort of the open source modality. And so yes, coming up later this year is our intention to put the models that we've used out on open source and we'll be releasing them through Bitbucket, and perhaps more importantly than just putting the code out there, we hope to be providing some documentation for what we use and how the code works and tools that go along with it to being able to analyze the results that come out of it. See, when we see a CME coming to Earth, what is the protocol to protect our technosphere and infrastructure? So Robert, thanks again for the great question that comes into play. And the procedures really drive through that advanced notice of the CME and then what happens is the Space Weather Prediction Center begins to develop their forecasts and understand that they can issue alerts and warning depending on the severity of the storm. And then if it's the really big one, then they're going to talk to their connections and trigger interactions with FEMA and begin the preparation steps that are needed to respond to events like that. And I guess the other point that I should make on this is that the Space Weather is really kind of a global phenomenon, right? So I talked earlier on of not having impacts in the US but having impacts in other parts of the world. It depends on where we are in the Earth and when the storm arrives. And so it really is also part of international collaboration and cooperation that comes into play for being able to observe things and also being able to predict and understand where the impacts are gonna be. We have one more coronal mass ejection question. Ooh, could Tiffany ask, could an intense solar storm like the CME last week ever impact terrestrial weather on Earth? Or like, for example, change the chemical makeup of the atmosphere? So this is a question that we're still probing the understanding of. We don't see a lot of major impacts from the CMEs on the weather to the Earth, but there is an interesting interplay of what's happening from the weather on the Earth, the big hurricanes, the big flows and perturbations to the fields that are happening from the mountains on the Earth and how that interplays with the driving that's coming from above and understanding that interplay and interaction is one of the really key fundamental questions that we're going after in an isosphere, thermosphere, physics today. Let's see. And I think this may be, yeah, we only have like three minutes left. So we have a few questions. Then I have a question for you. So how many active satellites are out in the atmosphere? Oh, so that's a darn good question. And it's a number that's growing by leaps and bounds with companies like SpaceX, Inspire, and Planet IQ that are launching small CubeSats. And so I think it's in the thousands, maybe even into tens of thousands, but I don't know that number off the top of my head. Okay. And do we get relevant magnetic currents in Earth from pulsars? Wow, okay, so pulsars are stars that are very far out that are orbiting pretty fast and are producing magnetic perturbations that come into play. And I am not aware of anything along the detections of those that comes into play, but it is also a question that I haven't asked. So I would have to go do some poking around on that one. Okay, and then we have a last one. What are the current challenges or open questions in space weather? And I know there may be a lot, but we are very short on time, so we have to... In one minute. Well, we're really trying to just... So I'll make it really quick. One is being able to understand what causes an eruption of the CME to happen on the sun, and then what is the direction of the magnetic field in that body as it's coming out? And then what are the consequences of that, especially during really strong driving? We don't know what that impact's gonna be and that's one of the things that the CGS Center is focusing on. So we have a survey, a gathering of scientists right now that are spending hundreds of hours trying to figure out what those key questions are going forward. So I hope by one minute answer provides enough foundation for moving forward from there. I hope so too. My last question for you is for any students who may be listening today, how did you become interested in data visualization and what advice would you give them if they are interested in becoming a scientist like you? Yeah, so it all starts out with being a geeky, nerdy kid that was trying to do that thing. And I went off to college and studied physics in college because that was kind of what motivated me understanding the math of the thing there. And part of that geeky little kid back on earth who got to go to space camp, he wanted to be an NASA astronaut. But the NASA astronaut selection criteria are pretty tough. And so I wasn't going to make that pathway. But when I was in graduate school, I started reaching out to folks that are doing things with NASA satellites and that naturally led to doing things with computer simulations and being able to do that. And so as a good first step these days, I think one of the key things that I would urge people to do is to try your hand at computer programming and see what you can do and what you can learn from that. And that's really a fundamental skill in science in my opinion these days. And with that excellent piece of advice, my thank you so much for being here today to chat with us about using mathematics to create images and the really cool work that you're doing. Also, thank you to our team behind the scenes, Paul, Brad, Aliyah and Dan for supporting this conversation today. If you're interested in more NCAR Explorer series events, definitely check out our website for upcoming lectures and conversations and to view recordings of past events. If you're 18 years or older, please take a moment to fill out our three to five minute anonymous survey that should be in your email to help you and help us better understand the impact of the program and how we can improve our next event. That survey will close on Monday. And I really hope to see all of y'all next time and have a great rest of your day. Bye. Bye.