How the weather in space can affect us on Earth - and the team trying to protect us

At the Met Office headquarters, the screens in one corner of the control centre are focussed on close up imagery of the Sun.

It is here that a space weather prediction team, one of only a small number worldwide, operates 24-hours a day, 365 days a year.

The weather in space has the potential to impact our lives here on Earth in a fundamental way. GPS, power grids and satellites are some of the vital technologies vulnerable to changes in the earth's magnetic field.

As a result, the Met Office has turned to Aberystwyth University researchers to help them improve their space weather forecasting abilities.

Space weather is mostly driven by activity on the Sun. Examples include solar flares, which are intense bursts of radiation.

The UK government has included severe space weather in its National Risk Register.

A 2025 estimate by Lloyds found that a severe space weather event could cost the world economy 2.4 trillion dollars ($2,400,000,000,000) over a five year period.

The Met Office has been working with key infrastructure operators since 2014 to try to keep us safe from those impacts, by producing forecasts using equipment on earth and satellites out in space.

Richard Stone, from the space forecasting team, said it allowed 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".

Stone said the available technology was incredibly impressive, but still at an early stage.

"We've made great strides since 2014, but observations are still limited," he said.

Despite spotting an event on the Sun's surface around three days before it reaches Earth, there are no more sightings until it reaches satellites about one million miles away.

This gives scientists around one hour to more precisely predict its real effect on Earth and, if needed, warn partners of the mitigation needed to avoid disruption.

"It's like seeing a storm on the east coast of America and then not having any observations until it gets to Ireland," said Stone.

The agency has turned to a group of researchers, led by Aberystwyth University, to improve its forecasting abilities.

The project is being led by Professor Huw Morgan, who is Head of Space Physics at Aberystwyth University, working alongside Northumbria, Durham and Reading universities.

"This pre-warning is a huge mitigation of the danger posed by space weather," said Morgan.

"For example, it gives the National Grid an opportunity to prepare and avoid power cuts, or airlines can divert their flights from high latitude to safer lower latitudes.

"Compared to forecasting normal weather on Earth, space weather forecasting is really quite a developing field. I mean, it's yet to mature where we can give exact forecasts."

Scientists can already predict which years will be busiest for space weather events, with the Sun following an approximately 11-year activity cycle.

"We'll have some very quiet years, very little space weather, and then it peaks then, at the peak of the cycle then we can have a lot of space weather events, maybe several a day," said Morgan.

The Sun reached the peak of its activity cycle, known as the Solar Maximum, in 2024, which is why more of us saw the Northern Lights - another example of space weather.

But the forecast warnings provided to technology companies and infrastructure operators here on Earth means people have felt very little impact so, despite the Sun's increased activity.

An 1859 geomagnetic storm known as the Carrington Event is often considered to be the benchmark for a worst-case scenario here on Earth.

Named after English astronomer Richard Carrington, the effects were felt widely, with an aurora seen in the sky across much of the world and disruption to the telegraph network, which had only started operating commercially in the 1840s.

Stone said during the Carrington Event, "even telegraph wires were heard to hum and crackle, and they were able to run the telegraph poles without any electricity because the input was so high".

The concern now is that, without mitigation, a modern day Carrington Event would have significantly greater consequences due to our increasing reliance on technology.

And the impacts of space weather are not just a consideration for people on Earth.

In 1991, Helen Sharman became the first British person to travel into space on an eight-day mission to the Mir Space Station.

She was taught where to shelter if any space weather were to hit the space station.

Dr Sharman said during the mission she was affected by radiation from outside the solar system, called galactic cosmic rays.

"They come through the materials that spacecraft are made of," said Sharman.

"They come through astronauts' skin, and they're what we notice as astronauts because quite often we see little bright flashes of light on our retinas, as those particles come through the spacecraft, through our skin, through our eyes, and affect our vision in that way.

"The higher up you are as well, of course, the further away from the Earth's magnetic field, the more likely you are to not be protected by the Earth's magnetic field.

"So in low Earth orbit, by and large, we're fairly well protected. This is why, when astronauts go to the Moon, or possibly to Mars in the future, we really need to consider how we can protect them much better from radiation."