**Space Weather for Air Travelers**

By Dr. Tony Phillips

At a time when much of the airline industry is struggling, one type of
air travel is doing remarkably well: polar flights. In 1999, United
Airlines made just twelve trips over the Arctic. By 2005, the number of
flights had grown to 1,402. Other airlines report similar growth.

The reason for the increase is commerce. Business is booming along
Asia's Pacific Rim, and business travel is booming with it. On our
spherical Earth, the shortest distance from Chicago to Beijing or New
York to Tokyo is over the North Pole. Suddenly, business travelers are
spending a lot of time in the Arctic.

With these new routes, however, comes a new concern: space weather.

"Solar storms have a big effect on polar regions of our planet,"
explains Steve Hill of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in
Boulder, Colorado. Everyone knows about the Northern Lights, but there's
more to it than that: "When airplanes fly over the poles during solar
storms, they can experience radio blackouts, navigation errors and
computer reboots---all caused by space radiation."

In 2005, United Airlines reported dozens of flights diverted from polar
routes by nasty space weather. Delays ranged from 8 minutes to nearly 4
hours, and each unplanned detour burned expensive fuel. Money isn't the
only concern: Pilots and flight attendants who fly too often over the
poles could absorb more radiation than is healthy. "This is an area of
active research---figuring out how much exposure is safe for flight
crews," says Hill. "Clearly, less is better."

To help airlines avoid bad space weather, NOAA has begun equipping its
GOES weather satellites with improved instruments to monitor the Sun.
Recent additions to the fleet, GOES 12 and 13, carry X-ray telescopes
that take spectacular pictures of sunspots, solar flares, and coronal
holes spewing streams of solar wind in our direction. Other GOES sensors
detect solar protons swarming around our planet, raising alarms when
radiation levels become dangerous.

"Our next-generation satellite will be even better," says Hill. Slated
for launch in 2014, GOES-R will be able to photograph the Sun through
several different X-ray and ultra-violet filters. Each filter reveals a
somewhat different layer of the Sun's explosive atmosphere---a boon to
forecasters. Also, advanced sensors will alert ground controllers to a
variety of dangerous particles near Earth, including solar protons,
heavy ions and galactic cosmic rays.

"GOES-R should substantially improve our space weather forecasts," says
Hill. That means friendlier skies on your future trips to Tokyo.

For the latest space weather report, visit the website of the Space
Weather Prediction Center at <http://www.sec.noaa.gov/> . For more about
the GOES-R series spacecraft, see
<http://goespoes.gsfc.nasa.gov/goes/spacecraft/r_spacecraft.html> . For
help in explaining geostationary orbits to kids---or anyone else---visit
The Space Place at
<http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/goes/goes_poes_orbits.shtml> .

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California
Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration.

![](media/image1.jpeg){width="6.0in" height="4.469444444444444in"}

Caption: *The shortest airline routes from the Eastern U.S. to popular
destinations in Asia go very near the magnetic North Pole, where space
weather is of greatest concern.*

*Note to editors:*

This image may be downloaded from
<http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/news_images/polar_routes_map.jpg>