Professor Sean Elvidge
Professor of Space Environment
Staff profile for Professor Sean Elvidge, Professor of Space Environment in the Space Environment and Radio Engineering (SERENE) group in the School of Engineering.
Creating a UK space weather shield
From academic research to national capability, this work is helping build a UK space weather forecasting service to support resilience and critical infrastructure.
Space weather may be invisible to the eye but has potential to cause technological havoc. Solar activity can trigger geomagnetic storms that damage power grids and pose radiation risks to satellites and aviation. For this reason, it sits on the UK Government’s National Risk Register alongside more familiar threats like terrorist attacks and national disasters.
Space weather has been notoriously difficult to predict, but at the University of Birmingham, Professor Sean Elvidge has spent the past decade creating models that allow it to be forecast and managed.
“It's very much what the weather forecasters do with our normal terrestrial weather,” says Professor Elvidge. “What is distinctive at Birmingham is that we are building a physics-based, data-assimilative forecast of the upper atmosphere, and turning that research into an operational UK capability.” Much as a weather report might warn of a band of rain, the space weather model can indicate, for example, when radio signals — such as the ones a car satnav uses — might be affected. Crucially, this work is creating an operational capability the UK can call its own.
At the heart of Elvidge’s work is a sophisticated data assimilation model of the ionosphere and thermosphere, the upper layers of the atmosphere that affect both satellite orbits and radio communications. The model fuses measurements from thousands of ground-based Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers – cousins of the satnav systems in cars and phones – and specialised radar systems with a physics-based representation of the upper atmosphere.
The work has real-world applications across critical infrastructure, from safeguarding power networks and satellite navigation to supporting the accurate timing relied on by financial markets.
- The work has real-world applications across critical infrastructure, from safeguarding power networks and satellite navigation to supporting the accurate timing relied on by financial markets.
Neither the data nor the model is perfect; the art lies in combining them in a way that is consistent with the known errors in both. The result is a dynamic picture, updated every 15 minutes, of how the upper atmosphere is behaving and what that means for critical services such as navigation and communications.
The work benefited from development funded as part of a broader £20 million UK Government Strategic Priority Fund programme to move space weather models out of academia and into operations at the Met Office, which runs the UK’s 24/7 space weather service. In the past, that service has relied heavily on US codes and data. The UK has strong academic expertise in space environment modelling, but historically much less in-house operational capability.
There is a clear sovereignty dimension. Space weather was added to the National Risk Register more than a decade ago because of concerns that an extreme geomagnetic storm could cause power outages and damage key parts of the power infrastructure such as transformers, which could take months or years to replace. “One of the biggest space weather risks to a UK society is losing parts of the national grid,” says Professor Elvidge.
Other risks are more diffuse but still serious: increased drag on satellites in low Earth orbit, making it harder to track “mega-constellations”; disruption to GNSS-based navigation for emergency services and logistics; and timing errors in financial trading systems that rely on satellite signals. The UK cannot simply depend on overseas partners for early warning in all of these domains.
The University of Birmingham has a uniquely strong research group in space weather. For physics-based data assimilation across the ionosphere and thermosphere, Birmingham is currently the only UK group doing this end to end” says Professor Elvidge. “That combination is what makes our work distinctive: we are not only developing new science, but turning it into forecasting capability that can be used operationally.”
The University of Birmingham has a uniquely strong research group in space weather.
That academic work, when coupled with the Met Office’s supercomputers and delivery organisation, can be turned into a dependable service delivered around the clock to clients, including UK Government agencies such as the National Space Operations Centre.
Drafting the terms of a licence is complex, however, as it needs to allow the Met Office the freedom to run the space weather model, while making sure the University keeps a clear stake in future research and development of the model. The Enterprise team were instrumental, crafting a detailed and compartmentalised agreement that allows the partnership to work.
But a meticulously thought-through deal is worth the effort. It will ensure the UK gains a sovereign operational capability in space weather forecasting without severing the academic roots that made it possible in the first place.