Economic Impacts of Space Weather

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Space weather events have affected commercial and governmental technologies since the earliest deployment of the first electrical technology—the telegraph—in the nineteenth century. Over the decades, reliable estimates of the economic impacts of a space weather event on technologies have often been seriously lacking. Even more lacking are estimates of the economic value that would occur if appropriate predicative and mitigation procedures were in place prior to the occurrence of a severe space weather event. Accurate assessments of the economic impacts of space weather occurrences are often difficult to determine. The reasons for this are many, ranging from issues of national security classifications and company trade secrets to poor availability of data. It is obvious that if a corporation publicly announced the susceptibility of one of its technologies to space weather events, that corporation would be at a significant disadvantage to a competitor who chose not to reveal its vulnerability. Some straightforward design mitigation features are not considered company confidential (e.g., shielding thicknesses). But some design features can be considered trade secrets since it is in the economic interests of a company to design in engineering features in subsystems and their components that can mitigate space weather impacts. Design features can include clever operational procedures, some of which might involve autonomous responses. In all such cases, economic trade-offs and cost-benefit decisions are involved. To date, only a very few technical papers and discussions in this journal and elsewhere have addressed economic issues in space weather. And those that do have tended not to address the economics of design decisions. I consider the absence of economic understanding of space weather impacts a serious missing link between space weather research and its applications. Considerations of space weather and its importance to commerce and society must become more interdisciplinary in a broad sense: Economists must become interested and involved in providing the types of assessments that can aid in defining research directions and mitigation procedures. A first step toward providing some cost-benefit analysis to space weather observing and prediction systems has just been initiated under the auspices of the National Research Council's Space Studies Board (SSB) (http://www8.nationalacademies.org/cp/projectview.aspx?key=48874). The SSB has assembled a committee of experts that will convene a public workshop in early 2008 to “assess the Nation's current and future ability to manage the effects of space weather events and their societal and economic impacts.” Discussions and analyses of historical events will be used to make some economic and social impact assessments of the events and what these assessments mean for current and planned observing systems, both space- and ground-based. This workshop follows advice given in the recent (2006) Report of the Assessment Committee for the National Space Weather Program (http://www.nswp.gov/nswp_acreport0706.pdf) and will certainly aid the program as it completes its next strategic plan. The SSB deserves commendation for taking on this difficult task. I eagerly look forward to the results of the upcoming SSB workshop. Louis J. Lanzerotti is editor of Space Weather, a distinguished research professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and a consultant at Alcatel-Lucent Technologies’ Bell Laboratories.