Well, It Turns out Some Magnetic Fields Are Harder to Avoid Than Others

BACKGROUND

You may have heard that you should not allow strong magnets near your electronic devices and credit cards. The magnetic field could damage electronic equipment and storage media, like computer hard drives, and, after enough exposure to a magnet, a credit card could be “deactivated.”

Well, it turns out some magnetic fields are harder to avoid than others.

Sunspots are regions of temporarily high magnetic activity on the surface of the Sun. From Earth, they look like dark spots on the Sun’s surface. Most solar storms (usually in the form of solar flares or coronal mass ejections) originate from these magnetically active regions and send bursts of charged particles toward Earth.

How do these events impact life on Earth? Well, according to a NASA Space News article from http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/10jan_solarcycle24/

"Solar storms can disable satellites that we depend on for weather forecasts and GPS navigation," says [David] Hathaway [of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center]. Radio bursts from solar flares can directly interfere with cell phone reception while coronal mass ejections (CMEs) hitting Earth can cause electrical power outages. "The most famous example is the Quebec outage of 1989, which left some Canadians without power for as much as six days."

Air travel can be affected, too.

Every year, intercontinental flights carry thousands of passengers over Earth’s poles. It's the shortest distance between, say, New York and Tokyo or Beijing and Chicago. In 1999, United Airlines made just twelve trips over the Arctic. By 2005, the number of flights had ballooned to 1,402. Other airlines report similar growth.

"Solar storms have a big effect on polar regions of our planet," says Steve Hill of the Space Weather Prediction Center. "When airplanes fly over the poles during solar storms, they can experience radio blackouts, navigation errors and computer reboots all caused by space radiation." Avoiding the poles during solar storms solves the problem, but it costs extra time, money and fuel to "take the long way around."

Now for the good news: More solar storms also means more auroras—"the greatest show on Earth." During the last solar maximum, Northern Lights were spotted as far south as Arizona, Florida and California. Not so long ago, only visitors to the Arctic regularly enjoyed auroras, but with increasing attention to space weather and constantly improving forecasts, millions of people at all latitudes will know when to go out and look.

YOUR TASK

SpaceTel is a telecommunications company that has several communications satellites orbiting Earth. In the past, SpaceTel’s satellites have experienced significant interference and even been damaged as a result of solar storm activity. There are precautions that the company can take to avoid damage in the future. Those precautions, however, are expensive (and potentially inconvenient for SpaceTel’s customers), so the company would like to limit its use of these precautions only to years when solar storm interference is most likely. You have been hired to be a consultant for SpaceTel. Your job is to advise SpaceTel as to when those precautions are “Recommended” and when they are “Critical” for the next 50-year window.

YOUR RESOURCES

Historical sunspot data will be provided for you. For the purposes of this task, use the following as a guideline:

Years with average of at least 50 predicted sunspots per month

à Precautions are RECOMMENDED

Years with average of at least 100 predicted sunspots per month

à Precautions are CRITICAL

YOUR PRODUCT

After completing your analysis of the data, you will submit to SpaceTel a 1-2 page report that includes the following:

o  A description of any patterns that you found in the data (specify data sources), along with an explanation of relevant mathematical strategies you used to determine those patterns

o  A description of your predictions for sunspot numbers for the next 50 years, along with an explanation of relevant mathematical strategies you used to make those predictions

o  Any relevant tables, charts, or graphs that help make your patterns and predictions clear to someone who has not seen the data before

o  A summary of your recommendations: In which years are precautions “Recommended” and in which years are precautions “Critical?”

Your report should be neatly organized and easy to read, utilizing complete sentences and correct grammar/spelling/punctuation.