Join The Team

Team title: Worst-case scenario for extreme solar events

Team ID: S1-02

Team Lead:

Ilya Usoskin (University of Oulu, Finland), ilya.usoskin@oulu.fi


Keywords (impact): Climate, Electric power systems, GICs, Satellite/debris drag, Navigation and/or Communications

Keywords (activity type): Understanding, Modeling, Forecasting, Assessment 

Introduction:

Solar eruptive events may cause serious consequences for the terrestrial system, including hazards for space-based technologies, human beings and even ground-based systems. The era of direct solar studies covers several decades and does not allow to assess extremes of the solar events and answer questions like: -- What is an extreme event? -- How often can they occur? -- Does Sun have a limit in producing extreme events? These question can be answered using indirect proxy data either in the solar past (cosmogenic proxy on multi-millennial time scales) or a large statistic of sun-like stars. This team will be focused on studying this extreme-value statistic and set up probabilistic scenarios for extreme and worst-case events.

Objectives:

  • To study extreme solar events in the past (multi-millennial time scale) using proxy data.
  • To estimate super-flare probabilities using the statistic of sun-like stars.
  • To provide a probabilistic model for extreme solar event occurrence.
  • To set up the worst-case scenario and its parameters.
  • To assess the expected impacts of severe events.

Action topics:

  • Extreme space weather events and their impacts,
  • Impact on human exploration and inter-planetary missions;
  • Research on solar activity indices for constraining long-term, extremely hazardous solar variability

Action plan:

  • two applications to ISSI International teams (2020-2021) are made on extreme solar events and their impact on the terrestrial environment;
  • if the applications fail, biannual meetings (e.g., at European Cosmic Ray Symposium, Nijmegen, July 2020) or telecons on the coordination of efforts in studying extreme events will be arranged;
  • bridging solar, terrestrial and stellar community in studying effects of super-flare on planets.

Clusters with overlapping topics:

S1: Long term solar variability,

S3: Solar eruptions,

H3: Radiation Environment in Heliosphere

Link to team external website: