Civil Protection and Emergency Preparedness ‑ Severe Space Weather

Solar activities are hard to precisely predict, and even if one could, a large number of sunspots per year does not automatically increased impact on earth. The talk will present three different classes of impact that have been identified by solar scientists, all of different type (radio outages, geomagnetic storms and solar radiation). The findings from century-long observations of the solar cycles and the magnetic field of the earth will be explained and combined with the most recent models for solar activity predictions in all three categories to create a scenario for the 2014 time horizon when the next peak of activities is expected. The presentation concludes with a look at possible warning and reaction lead times and emphasizes the growing role of numerical space weather prediction models in providing longer lead times to protect critical infrastructure and national security.