November Monthly Meeting: Space weather: the history, status, and future prospects for understanding the space environment.

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

While the term “space weather” is relatively new to the scientific vocabulary, attempts to understand associated phenomena such as the aurora go back centuries and as recently as the mid-20th century there were still significant gaps in our understanding of how the Sun causes phenomena at Earth such as geomagnetic storms. In this talk, Dr. Thomas Berger will review the history of our understanding of how the Sun and the Earth interact to create space weather, the many phenomena associated with space weather and their impacts on critical technological infrastructure, and what we need to do to increase our understanding of, and ability to mitigate, space weather impacts as we venture back to the Moon and eventually to Mars and beyond.

Bio

Dr. Thomas (Tom) Berger is the director of the University of Colorado Boulder Space Weather Technology, Research, and Education Center (SWx TREC). Prior to this position, he was the director of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in Boulder. Tom recently became the Principal Investigator of the NASA Space Weather Operational Readiness Development (SWORD) center of excellence, working with the Universities of Michigan, Iowa, Alaska, and NCAR/High Altitude Observatory to advance predictive models of the geospace environment during space weather storms. Tom’s original research was in solar physics as a member of the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto following his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He is originally from the Bay Area of California and has an undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics from the University of California Berkeley.