University of Helsinki
Our last o
nline Physics Colloquium for this spring season will take place on Friday, May 7th. We will have an inaugural lecture to be given by Emilia Kilpua, who recently got promoted as Full Professor in our department.
Emilia is an expert in solar-terrestrial physics, and her work focuses on solar eruptions and their impact on near-Earth space. She obtained an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016 to develop novel simulations to better understand these processes, and is currently also the coordinator of a Marie Sklodowska – Curie Action Innovative Training Network on space weather. She is actively involved in multiple space missions, such as NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and ESA’s Bepi-Colombo and Solar Orbiter.
In her colloquium, titled The Art of Predicting Space Weather, Emilia will talk about the challenges of forecasting the conditions in space around our planet and in our solar system.
The event will be held on Friday 7.05.21 at 14:15, on Zoom (Meeting ID: 614 1662 5342 – Passcode: 844713).
Here is her abstract:
Like normal weather, space weather can be calm or stormy. During big storms near-Earth space experiences dramatic changes; the magnetosphere surrounding our planet gets compressed, electric currents in the magnetosphere and ionosphere intensify and fluxes of high energy particle can rapidly increase by several orders of magnitudes. Vulnerability of modern society to space weather has made forecasting it increasingly important. The quality of predictions is however still very modest. This talk presents the key factors why forecasting space weather is so challenging, and discusses the recent and future steps in the scientific understanding of solar eruptions that are most crucial for improving the predictability.