Recently discovered space weather event ‘appears as a massive, spinning aurora near Earth’s magnetic poles’, say researchers
spacehurricanes, a phenomenon in the Earth’s upper atmosphere that can disrupt satellite signals, radar and radio communications.
While the hurricane-like atmospheric phenomenon can have major space weather effects, detection has so far relied on a tedious process of studying satellite images manually. The team said it had developed a new deep-learning system that could automatically detect and pinpoint space hurricanes through ultraviolet images, which they said could be used to analyse data from a newly launched China-Europe satellite.
“A space hurricane is a recently discovered space weather event that appears as a massive, spinning aurora near Earth’s magnetic poles,” the team said in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Space Weather on May 23.
The phenomenon is named after the tropical cyclones that occur in the north Atlantic and northeastern Pacific, which are the same weather phenomena as typhoons in the northwestern Pacific.