In the early hours of a night in May 2024, the sky over Britain lit up with the Northern Lights, a spectacle that drew crowds outdoors with their phones raised skyward.
But while the nation marvelled at the aurora, a team of scientists at the British Geological Survey were watching something far less romantic: the surge of electrical current the storm was driving through the ground beneath the National Grid.
For the first time, they weren’t watching blind. Thanks to a new forecasting system built under a five-year, £20 million UK research effort, they had already identified which substations were most exposed to the risk, and were able to give operators advance warning before real damage could be done. It marked a genuine turning point in Britain’s ability to see a solar storm coming, and to act on it.
That programme, known as SWIMMR (Space Weather Innovation, Measurement, Modelling and Risk), has now been the subject of an independent evaluation by Frazer-Nash Consultancy, and the verdict is striking: Britain has quietly become one of the world’s leading nations in forecasting the invisible violence of the Sun.
A risk hiding in plain sight
Solar storms rarely trouble the public imagination the way floods or pandemics do, yet the UK’s own National Risk Register places severe space weather in the same top tier of danger as both. The threat comes from coronal mass ejections, vast eruptions of solar material that can scramble satellite signals, disrupt aviation, and overload electricity infrastructure. The National Audit Office has previously pointed to a 2022 estimate putting the potential cost of a severe event to the UK economy at some £9 billion.
Until recently, Britain had comparatively little ability to see such an event coming with any precision. SWIMMR, led by the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the Natural Environment Research Council, working alongside the Met Office, the British Geological Survey, the British Antarctic Survey and RAL Space, set out to change that.
From laboratory to live warning system
The programme’s achievement was not simply scientific discovery, but speed of delivery. A new cloud-based platform has cut the time it takes to turn an academic forecasting model into an operational tool from several years down to roughly six months, a transformation in how quickly British research can be put to practical use. Five forecasting models developed through the programme are now moving into live service at the Met Office’s Space Weather Operations Centre, with full integration expected by the end of 2026.
The practical gains span the country’s infrastructure. New models can now track the high-energy radiation belts that threaten the satellites Britain depends on for GPS and communications, a forecasting capability that simply didn’t exist before. On polar flight routes, where radiation exposure can spike sharply during a storm, sensors developed by the University of Surrey and fitted to commercial aircraft and high-altitude balloons now feed data into a new model of aviation radiation risk. And at the STFC’s ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, an upgraded facility called NILE allows engineers, including those from major global technology firms, to test how routers, data-centre hardware and semiconductors hold up against the kind of radiation a severe solar storm can unleash.
A quiet triumph of British science
Professor Ian McCrea of RAL Space, who led the programme, said SWIMMR had delivered a major advance in the UK’s space-weather capability and helped place Britain among the leading nations in operational forecasting. Simon Machin of the Met Office described the shift as a fundamental change in how quickly research becomes real-world protection for the country’s satellites, aviation and power networks.
The numbers behind the programme tell their own story of national ambition: more than 70 organisations involved, 29 domestic and 33 international partnerships forged, and around 60 pence of additional investment generated for every pound of public money spent.
It is, in many ways, an unglamorous kind of national resilience, built not on dramatic intervention but on years of patient modelling, sensor networks and international collaboration. Yet as the next major solar storm eventually arrives, it may be this quiet infrastructure, more than any single dramatic gesture, that keeps Britain’s lights on, its planes flying, and its satellites working.
Read more here: https://www.ukri.org/news/uk-strengthens-defenses-against-severe-solar-storms/
