Book Review: Delores Knipp’s Understanding Space Weather and the Physics Behind It

Abstract

Delores Knipp’s textbook Understanding Space Weather and the Physics Behind It provides a comprehensive resource for space physicists teaching in a variety of academic departments to introduce space weather to advanced undergraduates. The book benefits from Knipp’s extensive experience teaching introductory and advanced undergraduate physics courses at the U.S. Air Force Academy. The fundamental physics concepts are clearly explained and are connected directly to the space physics concepts being discussed. To expand upon the relevant basic physics, current research areas and new observations are highlighted, with many of the chapters including contributions from a number of leading space physicists. The textbook is written in the style of university physics texts, such as Halliday et al. [2005], in that each chapter is filled with color diagrams, photos, callouts, and sidebars that contain brief digressions on real-life examples of the concepts being discussed, worked problem examples, and Pause for Inquiry questions that help students assess their understanding. Space physics, as we know, is the field of space science that studies the structure and dynamics of the Sun’s atmosphere and its interaction with everything inside the solar system (from planetary atmospheres and magnetospheres to asteroids, comets, and dust) as well as its interaction with the local interstellar medium. The Sun’s supersonically flowing magnetized solar wind carves out a bubble in the local interstellar medium called the heliosphere. Understanding the physical processes important for the heliosphere requires knowledge of plasma physics, a field that is often not taught at the undergraduate level. With our increasing reliance on space technology, global communication and navigation systems, and continental-scale power grids, we now realize that the Sun significantly influences the Earth’s space environment, with societal and technological implications. Because of all of these factors, space weather has emerged from the field of space physics as an independent area of study. The goal of the textbook is extremely ambitious, and the scope of topics covered is comprehensive. Each chapter begins with a list of concepts that students should already understand and a list of concepts discussed in the text. At the end of each chapter is a list of keywords and equations that were introduced, answers to the Pause for Inquiry questions posed throughout the chapter, and references and suggestions for further reading. Although students are expected to have studied calculus, mechanics, thermodynamics, and electricity and magnetism, the text provides background on all of the undergraduatelevel physics pertaining to space weather concepts. The textbook is clearly designed for advanced undergraduates in that much of the fundamental physics is reviewed as opposed to being assumed knowledge. In addition, many of the fundamental plasma physics topics normally included in graduate textbooks are introduced but are not fully developed or derived. For example, in the chapter that introduces the solar wind structure, an outline of Eugene Parker’s theory is presented, but instead of doing the full derivation of the solar wind structure (as is often done in graduate space physics texts), the path to the solution is provided by a flow chart diagram with the final results (such as the class of solutions of the solar wind velocity for different temperatures as a function of radial distance from the Sun) given as figures. This deliberate target of advanced undergraduate students and the book’s organization for that audience clearly distinguish Understanding Space Weather from other hybrid audience advancedundergraduateand beginning-graduate-level introductory space physics textbooks. The textbook’s three sections are presented in a logical order. The first section describes the structure and physics of the space environment, including the quiescent Sun; the solar wind; and Earth’s magnetosphere, ionosphere, and atmosphere. Along the way, the important concepts of radiation,