Advancing the Art of Solar Storm Forecasting: The Air Force Research Laboratory and the Air Force Weather Agency are trying to reduce the impact of violent solar storms on military assets by collaborating on efforts to better forecast the phenomena. The often-unpredictable plasma and radiation eruptions from the sun’s surface can wreak havoc on satellite-based communications. AFRL’s Solar Disturbance Prediction Program stationed at the National Solar Observatory’s complex in Sacramento Peak, N.M., started the “Solar Fusion” project. The effort aims to combine state of the art solar and space data from a large range of telescopes, satellites and computer modeling and make it accessible to the AFWA.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. still “believes” in his mantra of “Accelerate Change or Lose”—and indicated the doctrinal changes it produced when he was Air Force Chief of Staff played a role in the service’s recent response to Iran’s aerial assault on Israel, he…