The Met Office and the UK’s Department for Transport have published new guidance on how space weather can affect communications, navigation and other technologies used across the transportation sector, to help operators understand and prepare for potential impacts.
The guidance, available free via a Met Office space weather user account, combines expertise from the Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre with transportation-sector knowledge to help decision-makers understand the impacts of space weather and use Met Office notifications to take proportionate action during space weather events. It covers the aviation, maritime, rail and road sectors, and includes case studies from recent space weather events.
Met Office space weather manager Krista Hammond said, “While severe events are rare, space weather has the potential to bring impacts to transportation, but part of our role as one of a handful of 24/7 space weather forecasting centers in the world is to use our expertise to help people understand the risks and, importantly, take action to prevent the worst of the impacts. This guidance aims to demystify the alerts and warnings that are issued by the Met Office, helping key transportation operators to get the information they need to make critical decisions to mitigate impacts.”
A spokesperson for the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said, “The CAA actively encourages a greater understanding of space weather impacts to aviation, enabling industry to effectively mitigate applicable risks and improve resilience during a severe space weather event, and therefore fully supports the publication of information that supports these objectives, such as the new Met Office guidance.”
The guidance covers space weather terminology and notifications, along with a breakdown by mode of transportation of potential impacts from events such as solar flares, geomagnetic storms and solar radiation storms. Highlighted risks include disrupted high-frequency radio communications, GNSS/GPS positioning errors and, in the most severe events, the possibility of localized power outages. Most space weather events have little or no impact on everyday transportation operations, but the guidance is intended to help operators understand when impacts may occur during periods of heightened activity.
Alongside case studies on the May 2024 and September 2017 events, the guidance examines the 1859 Carrington Event, considered the most intense space weather event in recorded history. With society far less reliant on technology at the time, impacts were limited to erratic compass readings, disruption to telegraph services, fires from sparking telegraph lines, and auroras visible globally, including in tropical latitudes. Such severe events remain extremely rare, but the Carrington Event is used by planners as a reasonable worst-case scenario for severe space weather impacts.
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