A team of space weather experts from Northumbria University has been awarded more than £400,000 to explore how to better predict the conditions in near-Earth space.

The environment in the radiation belts 60,000km above the Earth can be highly dangerous—both to human life and to technology such as satellites launched into orbit.

However, the method currently used to predict when and where periods of high radiation might occur are based on average measurements, meaning scientists are unable to accurately forecast particularly dangerous events.

Professor Clare Watt, a space plasma physicist from Northumbria's Department of Mathematics, Physics and Electrical Engineering, is leading a new project which aims to find a way of forecasting space weather more accurately—something which would have huge economic benefits.

Funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the project will combine spacecraft observations and samples of the atmosphere at different positions in near-Earth space, with numerical models which use that data to predict dangerous weather conditions.

Speaking about the research, Professor Watt said: "The near-Earth environment is so variable because our Sun is a magnetically variable star affecting both electromagnetic waves and high-energy particles in the area of space close to Earth.