Origin of the Term Space Weather

Solar Energy / Space & Other Applications

Date posted: 03/04/17

Cade and Chan-Park (2015) report that although space weather is a fairly recent term, there is a rich history of similar terms being used beginning in the middle to late 1800s. Solar meteorology, magnetic weather, and cosmic meteorology all appeared during that time frame. The actual first appearance of space weather can be attributed to the publication Science News Letter in 1957 (with the first modern usage in 1959) and was possibly coined by the editor at the time, Watson Davis. More broadly, from the earliest days how did humanity refer to the science that we now call space weather? Space weather came into popular use in the 1990s, but its origin is somewhat murky with no satisfactory attribution. It is therefore useful to explore its origin and the heritage of similar terminology. Some aspects of this question and attributed the term space weather to Thomas Gold in 1959. However, this attribution was made due to Gold discussion of how studying interplanetary gas is the counterpart to meteorology on the Earth, so while Gold did not actually use the term space weather he did discuss similarities between space environmental phenomena and terrestrial meteorology. The authors show that this type of analogy, in fact, extends back much further to a full century before Thomas Gold. They explore terminology very similar to space weather that can be traced back to the mid-19th century and then present the earliest known usages of the exact term space weather from the 1950s. The field of space weather began as a collection of studies on seemingly unrelated phenomena, solar activity, the aurora, and magnetic disturbances. As these phenomena gradually became linked, the bigger picture came into focus as a massive system of connected physical processes that manifested themselves as a myriad of disturbances in the Earth environment.