From the casual conversation starter to the 24-hour cable channels and web sites devoted to the subject, everyone talks about weather. There’s even weather in space—and whether you realize it or not, it’s creating havoc in our modern technological world.

Indeed, space weather is all around us. And although there are no nightly news reports on the latest front moving through the heavens, we’re rapidly developing the tools necessary to measure and observe trends in cosmic meteorology. But why does space weather matter to us? It doesn’t affect whether we bring an umbrella to work or require us to monitor early school closings. It’s far, far away and of little concern to us… right?

March 13, 1989. The Department of Defense tracking system that keeps tabs on 8,000 objects orbiting Earth briefly loses track of 1,300 of them. In New Jersey, a surge of extra current in the power lines fries a $10 million transformer. Shocks to a power station in Quebec leave 6 million people without electricity for 9 hours. Residents of Florida, Mexico, and the Grand Cayman Islands see glowing curtains of light in the sky. All these bizarre and seemingly random events were caused by a series of solar explosions that launched bolts of electrified gas at the Earth. Trillions of watts of electricity had poured into the atmosphere–double the power generating capacity of the entire United States.

Before rockets and radio and the advent of other technological gadgets, we probably would never have noticed the effects of this space storm. But in today’s world, the greatest space storm of the 22nd solar maximum rang like a wake-up call. And we are now in the midst of another solar maximum whose effects are expected to be felt all the way through 2004.

Storms from the Sun explores the emerging science of space weather and traces its increasing impact on a society that has become dependent on space-based technologies. Authors Mike Carlowicz and Ramon Lopez explain what space weather really means to us down here – and what it may mean for future explorations and colonization of distant worlds. By translating the latest findings of NASA and other top scientists into fascinating and accessible descriptions of the latest discoveries, we are privy to some of the most closely held secrets that the solar-terrestrial system has to offer.