The Business of Space Weather

A company aims to offer better forecasts based on a new solar model

- BY SARAH SCOLES

When solar storms flare up, they can scramble the GPS signals that farmers rely on to guide their high-tech tractors.

ON MAY 10, 2024, a John Deere dealer sent out a strange press release. “Please be advised that there is significant solar flare and space weather activity,” it read. The company, a maker of tractors and ball caps, isn’t the first entity you'd turn to for advice about the sun. But the star’s storms were messing with the GPS systems on John Deere’s precision agricultural equipment, which uses geographic guidance to help farmers precisely plant, spray and harvest crops. “We apologize for the inconvenience,” the press release continued, even though no one should have to apologize on behalf of space.

We tend to think of the sun in terms of its regular daily activities (rising, setting). But “solar activity” causes eruptions from the sun’s surface that release energy and charged particles into space. Those eruptions have a profound effect on terrestrial life. Solar storms produce space weather that can irradiate astronauts and people in planes, disrupt satellites' electronics and drag their orbits down, and even affect the electrical grid and cellphone coverage.

These problems are part of why scientists try to predict how active the sun will be at given times, so they can tell farmers when their tractor might drift down the wrong alfalfa row or let electric companies know when they might experience outages. There’s just one problem: we don’t really understand how the sun works in the present, let alone how it will act in the future. Still, heliophysicists, as sun scientists are called, have different, if imperfect, ways of modeling the nearest star so they can make better forecasts.