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Space weather forcasts met the same fate as the more down-to-earth kind when
last week’s solar eclipse in southern Africa failed to match the prediction. Two
days before the eclipse, Zoran Mikic and colleagues from Science Applications
International Corporation in San Diego predicted the shape of the Sun’s corona,
based on the Sun’s magnetic field strength. But Jim Klimchuk of the Naval
Research Laboratory in Washington DC says the match was not great. “It wasn’t as
nice as one would hope.” The Sun is at the peak of its 11-year activity cycle
and is particularly erratic. “It wasn’t really their…