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

From a quiet operations room in the United Kingdom, a small team of scientists watches the Sun around the clock, standing between modern civilization and a force it has largely forgotten to fear. Solar flares and geomagnetic storms — invisible to the naked eye — carry the power to silence GPS networks, collapse power grids, and darken satellites that billions of people depend on without knowing it. As the Sun reaches the peak of its eleven-year cycle, researchers at the Met Office and several British universities are racing to extend the narrow window of warning humanity has before the next gr