Space weather poses trillion-dollar threat; UK Met Office races to improve forecasts

On the screens at the UK Met Office control centre, the Sun never stops being watched. In one corner of the operations room, a small team of space weather forecasters keeps vigil twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, monitoring the surface of our star for signs of trouble. They are among only a handful of such teams on the planet, and their job is to see what's coming before it arrives.

The threat they're watching for is real and quantifiable. A 2025 analysis by Lloyds of London estimated that a severe space weather event could cost the global economy 2.4 trillion dollars over five years. The UK government has formally listed severe space weather as a national risk. The danger stems from the Sun's temperament: solar flares—intense bursts of radiation—and other disturbances in the solar wind can ripple across space and slam into Earth's magnetic field, disrupting the technologies we've built our civilization around. GPS systems go haywire. Power grids fail. Satellites stop working. The infrastructure we depend on, often invisibly, becomes suddenly fragile.

The Met Office has been working with infrastructure operators since 2014 to build defences against this invisible threat. Richard Stone, part of the space forecasting team, explained how the system works: equipment on Earth and satellites in space allow them to "diagnose anything that's happening on the Sun's surface, provide a forecast and alert the relevant users to be able to take mitigating actions." The technology is impressive, Stone acknowledged, but it remains in its infancy. Scientists can spot a solar disturbance on the Sun's surface roughly three days before it reaches Earth. Then comes a gap—a blind spot in the observations. Nothing is seen until the event reaches satellites stationed about a million miles away. At that point, scientists have roughly one hour to refine their prediction and warn the people who run the power plants, the airlines, the communication networks. Stone offered an analogy: "It's like seeing a storm on the east coast of America and then not having any observations until it gets to Ireland."

To close that gap, the Met Office has partnered with researchers at Aberystwyth University, working alongside teams from Northumbria, Durham, and Reading. Professor Huw Morgan, head of space physics at Aberystwyth, leads the effort. He emphasized what even an hour of warning can accomplish: it gives the National Grid time to prepare and prevent blackouts; it allows airlines to reroute flights from high latitudes, where radiation exposure is greater, to safer lower altitudes. But Morgan was candid about the limits of the field itself. "Compared to forecasting normal weather on Earth, space weather forecasting is really quite a developing field," he said. "It's yet to mature where we can give exact forecasts."

The Sun follows a rhythm. Its activity cycles roughly every eleven years, with periods of quiet interrupted by peaks of intense solar storms. The Sun reached its peak—the Solar Maximum—in 2024, which is why more people than usual saw the Northern Lights that year. At the peak of the cycle, multiple space weather events can occur in a single day. Yet despite the increased solar activity, most people on Earth have felt almost nothing, because the forecasts and warnings have allowed infrastructure operators to take protective action.

The benchmark for catastrophe is the Carrington Event of 1859. Named after English astronomer Richard Carrington, it was a geomagnetic storm so powerful that auroras appeared across much of the world and telegraph networks—the cutting-edge technology of the era—fell into chaos. Telegraph wires hummed and crackled with induced current so strong that operators could run messages without any external power source. If such an event struck today, the consequences would be vastly more severe. Our dependence on electrical systems and digital networks is total. A modern Carrington Event, without warning and without mitigation, could be economically and socially catastrophic.

The threat extends beyond Earth. Astronauts in orbit face radiation exposure that ground-based populations do not. Helen Sharman, the first British person in space, flew an eight-day mission to the Mir Space Station in 1991. She was trained where to shelter if space weather struck. During her mission, she experienced radiation from outside the solar system—galactic cosmic rays that pass through spacecraft materials and through human skin and eyes, producing flashes of light on the retina. The higher an astronaut travels, the farther from Earth's protective magnetic field, the greater the exposure. Low Earth orbit offers reasonable protection, but missions to the Moon or Mars will require new shielding strategies. As space exploration expands, protecting human crews from radiation becomes an urgent engineering problem alongside the earthbound challenge of protecting infrastructure from solar storms.