 Scientists at NCAR's High Altitude Observatory are studying the sun-earth connection. Dr. Rebecca Centeno tells us more. Can you tell us a little bit about what do scientists study here in the High Altitude Observatory? So scientists at the High Altitude Observatory concern themselves mostly with the sun-earth system. We try to understand the origins of the sun's variability and the origins of space weather and how they impact the Earth's atmosphere. What is space weather and why is it important to study it? Space weather is a term that refers to the changing conditions on the sun and how they affect the interplanetary medium. And these changes can come in many different forms such as changes in the radiation. This is the light that the sun emits or changes in the magnetism. Space weather is important to us because it has the capability to disrupt technologies that human society has come to rely on. Big space weather events such as solar storms always originate in regions of the sun that have high concentrations of magnetic forces. The magnetism is important because it has the capability to store and release energy really quickly. And this is precisely how oftentimes solar storms are produced. Being able to predict its behavior, we can nicely inform and improve space weather forecasting and this will help us as a technological society to curb some of the effects of space weather in advance of them happening. As you can imagine we can't actually go to the sun and put instruments to measure things directly there. So we have to infer this information from the light that the sun emits. Information about the physical properties in the sun's atmosphere is contained in the light spectrum which is in the colors and the different wavelengths of light. The way to get this information from the light is to capture the light with telescopes and analyze it with instruments and then interpret it by means of theory and modeling. By using observations of the sun at all these different wavelengths at all these different colors we can actually build a three-dimensional picture of what is happening in the sun.