Using Publicly Open Databases for Evaluating the Potential Risk and Direct Economic Loss associated with Space Weather Hazards in Operational Decision Making

Space Weather (SW) hazards are a recognized threat for many technological systems, including e.g. spatially-distributed terrestrial infrastructures such as power grids and pipelines sensitive to geomagnetic disturbances, communication and navigation systems dependent on SW-induced ionospheric irregularities, and robotic space missions exposed to hard radiation caused by solar radiation storms. The evaluation of the potential risk of failures in such SW - impacted systems is essential for operational decision making at any level, from the coordination of diversified energy sources to scheduling of spacecraft launches.

In this talk, I present a newly developed library of IDL and Python codes for evaluating the level of the system's sensitivity to a SW impact, as well as the estimate the potential losses. The developed software toolkit allows one to reveal the most relevant SW parameter for monitoring system condition and to determine the probability and the average time lag of system response. The implemented data analysis approach, when applied to existing databases of SW observations and numerical simulations and forecasts, can provide more accurate predictions of possible losses, and enables an accurate evaluation of potential risks of the SW hazard. The primary outcome of this analysis -- the probability and the "price of loss" of the SW impact -- can be directly used in decision-making models based on the Game Against Nature framework. This class of decision-making models takes into account operational risk limits for a specific technological system, and makes it possible to reveal the optimal strategy with a given level of uncertainty for a particular hazardous condition. The presented methodology is demonstrated on an analysis of the Northern Electric Grid vulnerability (Alberta, Canada), and can be applied to any system sensitive to SW disturbances.