Space Weather Awareness, Engagement, and Outreach Activities at UKRI STFC RAL Space

Space weather is a natural hazard posing a threat to critical infrastructures worldwide with varying global and regional impacts. Phenomena such as geomagnetic storms and atmospheric disturbances can impact power grids, communications, and various other satellite signals. The risk has increased in prominence as society has become more dependent on space-based technologies and on more-modern infrastructures susceptible to space-weather impacts. Space weather originates at the Sun, and so it is important to understand the Sun-Earth chain of events to be able to forecast and mitigate for such space-weather phenomena and to predict their effects and resulting impacts on human society. Following the inclusion of severe space weather in the National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies in 2011, STFC led a Public Dialogue exercise on space weather which brought experts and the general public together to discuss the space weather and establish the general awareness of space weather from across different locations in the UK. The report of this project provided insights on how best to establish policies that will engage the general public in the mitigation of problems caused by space weather. In the same timeframe, STFC also led a three-year academic networking activity (named SEREN) that funded activities to give scientists better insight into the types of information that industry and policy-makers need in order to address the problems caused by space weather. More widely, the UK has undertaken a series of wide-ranging investigations to mitigate space-weather impacts at the national level including the ongoing development of a national Space Weather Strategy - where the UK looks to experts across all sectors to feed into its development. This has also previously included the setting up of a UK staffed 24/7 space-weather forecasting centre at the Met Office alongside the formation of the Space Environment Impacts Expert Group (SEIEG) of space-weather experts to provide the necessary advice to government; this latter group is currently Chaired from RAL Space. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the above with an emphasis on the key activities past, present, and planned, at RAL Space around space weather awareness, engagement, and outreach.