Abstract
This article provides a concise review of the main physical structures and processes involved in space weather’s interconnected systems, emphasizing the critical roles played by magnetic topology and connectivity. The review covers solar drivers of space weather activity, the heliospheric environment, and the magnetospheric response, and is intended to address a growing cross-disciplinary audience interested in applied aspects of modern space weather research and forecasting. The review paper includes fundamental facts about the structure of space weather subsystems and special attention is paid to extreme space weather events associated with major solar flares, large coronal mass ejections, solar energetic particle events, and intense geomagnetic perturbations and their ionospheric footprints. This paper aims to be a first step towards understanding the magnetically connected space weather system for individuals new to the field of space weather who are interested in the basics of the space weather system and how it affects our daily lives.
Highlights
Space weather is a growing hazard to our technologies and society
Because space weather is a vast discipline covering a plethora of interconnected systems, it is difficult to review the basic concepts of the system in a way that is understandable and brief
This paper aims to explore the basics of the space weather system and how it affects our daily lives for those who may not necessarily have the time, resources, or expertise to comb through the vast scientific literature necessary to understand this topic
Summary
Space weather is a growing hazard to our technologies and society. Severe and mid-scale space weather events can disrupt satellite communications and navigation systems, damage power distribution systems, expose astronauts to a harsh radiation environment, and cause an array of other detrimental effects in space and on the ground. This review article aims to provide a concise, yet comprehensive introduction into the main components of the interconnected space weather system, focusing on the crucial role played by the involved magnetic field configuration’s geometry and connectivity as evidenced by recent observational and theoretical studies. To achieve such breadth in the limited length of a review, we present the most important structures and processes underlying space activity, and to offer a bird’s-eye view of their system-level interactions. The system-level aspects of the interconnected nature of space weather are reviewed in Section 5, followed by a short conclusion
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