Space weather forecasting—predicting the kind of energetic particles the Sun will throw at us—is years behind weather forecsting here on Earth. As solar physicist Scott McIntosh put it, “Our current model of space weather forecasting is, ‘oh shit a sunspot happened eight minutes ago, now we have to figure out what’s going to happen.” It’s a shame we’re not better at predicting space weather, since it can bust up satellites and even electronics on Earth.
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New observations led by McIntosh, director of the High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric research (NCAR), might change that. From 2010 to 2013, McIntosh and his team used a trio of satellites to observe the entire solar surface at once for the first time. They watched as bright magnetic spots moved around the Sun, making the first real observation of a behavior lots of scientists have expected to see its surface. The so-called Rossby waves the team observed will hopefully give us a useful new tool to predict solar weather—energetic particles blasting the Earth from magnetic events on the Sun—with several days or more advance notice.

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“The Earth has these jet streams at the interfaces of air masses,” McIntosh, whose findings are published today in the journal Nature Astronomy, told Gizmodo. “We think there’s similar behavior going on at the interior of the Sun—and that the sunspot cycle is a manifestation of that.”

Rossby waves are a natural result of spinning planets with variable topography and moving air masses. Weather in the United States is governed by a cold polar air mass and a warm tropical air mass, with the jet stream, a boundary of fast, eastward-blowing wind a few miles above the surface, marking their border. Natural boundaries like mountains cause the jet stream meander northwards or southwards, creating Rossby waves. The Earth spins more quickly at the equator than the poles, causing those north and southward winds to twist into swirls, for the same reason that your body would rotate if you laid perpendicularly on a pair of parallel moving walkways moving different speeds.

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