Scientists announced Monday, June 19 that they have taken the first step towards making more accurate forecasts of space storms.

"We have established a benchmark," said Natchimuthuk Gopalswamy, of The Catholic University of America, the study's lead author.

Watch a video of a June 6 solar storm. Scientists predicted its arrival on Earthwithin six hours.

During peaks in the solar cycle, the sun can kick off as many as a half dozen of the eruptions a day.

Of course, not all of them head toward Earth. But those that do can cause plenty of headaches and glitches in an increasingly wired world.

However, predicting when any particular CME might reach our planet is no easy task. Bridging the 93 million-mile (150 million-kilometer) gulf that separates us from our star can take the ejections anywhere from two to more than four days.

[inset]

At best, scientists can forecast the arrival of a CME within 12 hours, a cushion that leaves some uneasy.

But help is now on the way. Solar winds blow a stream of electrically charged gas particles at a steady rate of about 250 miles (400 kilometers) per second. Gopalswamy said his team found that CMEs -- which can leave the sun at speeds up to five times that rate -- are typically slowed or accelerated by the solar wind while en route to Earth.

By estimating the effect of the solar wind on any one CME, the team said it suffices to then gauge the ejections initial velocity to forecast when it might arrive at Earth.

The team created the model by comparing historic data collected by satellites positioned both on and off the sun-Earth line. That allowed them to accurately measure both the initial velocity of CMEs at the sun, thanks to the satellites that viewed the events in profile, and the velocity of the ejections far from the sun in Earths vicinity.

The combined measurements gave the team the change in the CMEs velocity attributable to the influence of the solar wind.

The team, which included scientists from NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, used the technique to predict within six hours when a June 6 ejection would arrive at Earth. Further work should refine the model, allowing even more precise forecasts.

Ernest Hildner, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations Space Environment Center, heralded the model.

"This result announced today gives us a new opportunity to determine the onset time of any particular storm," Hildner said.

The team presented the study results during a press conference held Monday at a meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society at Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

Future space missions, like NASAs Solar-Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) will use a pair of satellites to view Earth-directed CMEs in three dimensions, allowing scientists to precisely pinpoint their velocity.