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Speaking as a former solar-terrestrial physicist, I was underwhelmed with the Horizon treatment as applied to "Solar Storms". It was only a single programme on the devil's lightbox. and so nothing to justify shouting at the TV, but I did catch myself quietly muttering the odd FFS. The thing is, space weather is an important topic, or at least it is in certain industrial and government sectors. But maybe not for the general public. You can now download smartphone applications that give you real-time graphical representations of energetic electron and proton fluxes, but when de-contextualised these mean nothing. Space weather is important, but the practice of space weather forecasting is crude, and little of the pure science research discussed in the context of space weather has significant relevance in that context. As a former space physicist, I must plead guilty to having exploited a tenuous connection to help boost the public profile of my work. I suppose I should be grateful that no-one was listening at the time. Or at least no-one who couldn't understand Danish. Strip away all the macho stuff, the laboratory experiments in high-power magnetohydrodynamics discussed in the Horizon programme are relevant, and this research will hopefully teach us much about the generation of explosive events on the sun's surface that give rise to solar storms, and, if the interplanetary conditions are right, electromagnetic storms in Earth's space environment. Talking of the irrelevant, take the ionospheric heating at EISCAT discussed by Mike Kosch, who in the Horizon programme was joined by Mike Rietveld, the man responsible for my PhD viva extending to 4.5 hours. Heating involves the generation of localised plasma instabilities in the ionosphere, with enhanced plasma density as a consequence. But such boosts in atmospheric density, which will to a degree impact on low-altitude spacecraft orbits, are short-lived relative to those resulting from chemical changes associated with energetic charged particle precipitation. Space physics research of real relevance to space weather is done, but not in the UK. The UK's strength is in solar physics research. In Canada and the US, there are initiatives in space and ground-based multi-spectral imaging of the magnetosphere that are of direct relevance to space environment monitoring and storm forecasting. In Europe, however, we spend virtually nothing on solar-terrestrial science. If we spent considerably more, we might expect a little more in return, but vision and creativity are as much lacking as funds. So it's -1 for Horizon on solar storms. But I would give +1 for Kate Humble and Helen Czerski's "Orbit", the first episode of which was broadcast yesterday. The programme suffered from some of the usual presentation and production clichés, but the science was sound, and explained clearly. Francis On 7 Mar 12, at 08:14, Dr Helen Mason wrote: > Did anyone see Horizon last night on 'Solar Storms'. > > It was a bit provocative, NASA-centric and male dominated, > but did have a few good SDO movies. I was a bit worried about the amount of Sun watching which was going on, with > 'smoked glass'??!! Also I might have been wrong, but > I though I heard them say that the corona was 20 times > hotter than the surface of the Sun...hmmm.. just out by > a few orders of magnitude. -- Dr Francis Sedgemore journalist and science writer www.sedgemore.com ********************************************************************** Further information about the psci-com discussion list, including list archive, can be found at the list web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/psci-com.html You may also change your settings and subscribe/unsubscribe to psci-com from the web site. Psci-com is part of the National Academic Mailing List Service, known as 'JISCMail'. It adheres to the JISCMail Acceptable Use Policy: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/acceptableuse.html and to the JISCMail guidelines for etiquette: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/etiquette.html Email commands: 1. To suspend yourself from the list, whilst on leave, for example, send an email to mailto:[log in to unmask] with the following message: set psci-com nomail -- [include hyphens] 2. To resume email from the list, send an email to [log in to unmask] with the message: set psci-com mail -- [include hyphens] 3. To leave psci-com, send an email to [log in to unmask] with the message: leave psci-com -- [include hyphens] Please allow up to 24 hours for these commands to activate. Remember that you will need to send commands using the same email address that you used to register on psci-com. To contact the Psci-com list owner, please send an email to: [log in to unmask] **********************************************************************