ISWI Newsletter - Vol.13 No.09
16 September 2021

Dear members of the ISWI Community:

[1] (ONLINE) The International Space Weather Initiative Workshop on Space Weather:
Science and Applications; 2 ÷ 3 November 2021,

View this email in your browser ( click here)

Submitted by Sharafat Gadimova

[2] Callisto news-letter 91 with a new instrument

Submitted by Christian Monstein

[3] Message from Prof. Kazuo Shiokawa,

Although we are receiving many abstracts, we have extended the deadline of abstract submission of STP-15 to October 5, 2021, to accomodate more interest on the solar-terrestrial physics and the PRESTO program of SCOSTEP. This is a unique event for interdisciplinary topics connecting physics from the sun to the earth.

A workshop for students and young scientists (STEPSYS) will be held one-day prior to the symposium. Please visit https://stp15.in/ for more information.

With best regards,
Kazuo Shiokawa,
SCOSTEP President

PS Please use website address and do not use . Both reach the same STP-15 website, but the latter cause some security warnings.

List of confirmed keynote/invited speakers (titles omitted):

Keynote: Drew Turner, Thomas Immel, Robert Cameron, Dipankar Banerjee

Invited: Natalie Krivova, Alexi Glover, Jim Spann, Manolis Georgoulis, Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla, Camilla Scolini, Eleanna Asvestari, Huixin Lin, Claudia Stolle, Dibyendu Chakrabarty, Lynn Harvey, Villie Maliniemi, Annika Drews, Dibyendu Nandi, Erik Richard, Kanya Kusano, Ioannis Daglis, Shing F. Fung, Theodoros Sarris, Raffaele Marino, Ian McCrea, Durgesh Tripathi, Gurbax Lakhina, Yosuke Yamazaki, Ashwini Kumar Sinha, Seiki Asari, Amore Nel, Juergen Matzka

Session structures:
/Session 1. Overarching topics in Sun-Earth connection
/Session 2. PRESTO Pillar 1: Sun, Planetary Space, and Geospace
/Session 3. PRESTO Pillar 2: Space Weather and Earth’s Atmosphere
/Session 4. PRESTO Pillar 3: Solar Activity and its Influence On Climate
/Session 5. Space Weather Prediction and Implementation
/Session 6. Modeling, Database and Data Analysis Tools for Solar-Terrestrial Physics
/Session 7. New ground- and space-based initiatives for Solar-Terrestrial Physics
/Session 8: Special session on "Geomagnetism- The connecting link between Sun and Earth"
/Workshop on Solar-Terrestrial Physics for Students and Young Scientists (STEPSYS)

Further information on the workshop can be found on the event website: (click here)

Submitted by Kazuo Shiokawa

[4] AGS Newsletter- Vol.4 No. 08,

View this email in your browser ( click here)

Submitted by Aderonke Obafaye

[5] Message from Dr. Nat Gopalswamy regarding STEPSYS

Read it.

Submitted by Dr Nat Gopalswamy

[6] Possibility of major solar event affecting the global internet

Originally published on Live Science

An 'Internet apocalypse' could ride to Earth with the next solar storm, new research warns.
By Brandon Specktor, 9 September 2021.
The underwater cables that connect nations could go offline for months, the study warns.

The sun is always showering Earth with a mist of magnetized particles known as solar wind. For the most part, our planet's magnetic shield blocks this electric wind from doing any real damage to Earth or its inhabitants, instead sending those particles skittering toward the poles and leaving behind a pleasant aurora in their wake.

But sometimes, every century or so, that wind escalates into a full-blown solar storm -- and, as new research presented at the SIGCOMM 2021 data communication conference warns, the results of such extreme space weather could be catastrophic to our modern way of life.

In short, a severe solar storm could plunge the world into an "internet apocalypse" that keeps large swaths of society offline for weeks or months at a time, Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in the new research paper. (The paper has yet to appear in a peer-reviewed journal).

"What really got me thinking about this is that with the pandemic we saw how unprepared the world was. There was no protocol to deal with it effectively, and it's the same with internet resilience," Abdu Jyothi told WIRED. "Our infrastructure is not prepared for a large-scale solar event."

Part of the problem is that extreme solar storms (also called coronal mass ejections) are relatively rare; scientists estimate the probability of an extreme space weather directly impacting Earth to be between 1.6% to 12% per decade, according to Abdu Jyothi's paper.

In recent history, only two such storms have been recorded -- one in 1859 and the other in 1921. The earlier incident, known as the Carrington Event, created such a severe geomagnetic disturbance on Earth that telegraph wires burst into flame, and auroras -— usually only visible near the planet's poles -- were spotted near equatorial Colombia. Smaller storms can also pack a punch; one in March 1989 blacked out the entire Canadian province of Quebec for nine hours.

Since then, human civilization has become much more reliant on the global internet, and the potential impacts of a massive geomagnetic storm on that new infrastructure remain largely unstudied, Abdu Jyothi said. In her new paper, she tried to pinpoint the greatest vulnerabilities in that infrastructure.

The good news is, local and regional internet connections are likely at low risk of being damaged because fiber-optic cables themselves aren't affected by geomagnetically induced currents, according to the paper.

However, the long undersea internet cables that connect continents are a different story. These cables are equipped with repeaters to boost the optical signal, spaced at intervals of roughly 30 to 90 miles (50 to 150 kilometers). These repeaters are vulnerable to geomagnetic currents, and entire cables could be made useless if even one repeater goes offline, according to the paper.

If enough undersea cables fail in a particular region, then entire continents could be cut off from one another, Abdu Jyothi wrote. What's more, nations at high latitudes - such as the U.S. and the U.K. - are far more susceptible to solar weather than nations at lower latitudes. In the event of a catastrophic geomagnetic storm, it's those high-latitude nations that are most likely to be cut off from the network first. It's hard to predict how long it would take to repair underwater infrastructure, but Abdu Jyothi suggests that large-scale internet outages that last weeks or months are possible.

In the meantime, millions of people could lose their livelihoods.

"The economic impact of an Internet disruption for a day in the US is estimated to be over $7 billion," Abdu Jyothi wrote in her paper. "What if the network remains non-functional for days or even months?"

Read this

Submitted by Dr. George Maeda

(1) ONLINE-Workshop2021-Announcement 142KB, 2 pages

(2) Callisto news-letter 91 with a new instrument   454KB, 5 pages

(3) Workshop on Solar-Terrestrial Physics for Stud. and Young Scientists (STEPSYS) 90KB, one page