If Nature ever wished to send a strong message to Congress, she did so this week.

Just as the most powerful space storm in 30 years is striking Earth, a congressional subcommittee will hear testimony today from scientists who would secure the future of space weather forecasting.

SEC predictions are much like standard weather forecasts, drawing data from multiple sources and going out to many customers, including NASA, the Department of Defense, airlines and utility companies.

The forecasts allow satellite operators to put some craft to sleep and reduce the operations of others, Kunches said in a telephone interview during the height of the storm Wednesday. Power grid operators have learned how to thwart problems, in part by reducing the amount of power trading and line switching they do as a storm arrives. A solar storm in 1989 tripped a power grid in Canada, and engineers have learned much from that experience.

"They fly by seat-of-the-pants and make adjustments to the grids," Kunches said. "It's something people have gotten savvy at."

And its something they can do only because they know what's coming, several scientists agree.

Should the current tempest send a message to Congress?

"I sure hope so," Kunches said. "If this one doesn't, I don't know what we have to do."

Kunches called this week's first storm the strongest he's seen in 30 years. Others have said it is among the four most powerful in recorded history.

Leon Golub is a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and author of "Nearest Star: The Surprising Science Of Our Sun." Golub said a lot of the SEC's customers -- from NASA to private satellite and power grid operators -- are worried about losing the forecasts.

"Our highly technological society is very vulnerable to space weather effects," Golub told SPACE.com. "And without these alerts and warnings, they can suffer huge disruptions in service and economic losses."

Meanwhile, this week's storm was not near as bad as it might have been.

When it left the Sun on Tuesday, the first cloud of charged particles was an undeniable monster. Its expanding bubble of hot gas -- a coronal mass ejection -- was photographed by the SOHO spacecraft as it left the Sun. Radiation from the flare arrived in about 8 minutes and generated radio disruptions.

The biggest danger comes when a storm's physical material -- the charged particles -- slams into Earth's otherwise protective sphere of magnetism, which can be overwhelmed.

If the storm's magnetic field is pointed in the same direction as Earth's, as this one was for most of the time, then it slips by comparatively calmly, Golub explained. But if it's oriented in the opposite way, as this one was near the beginning of the event and again late yesterday, then the two magnetic fields essentially join forces. Scientists call it reconnection.

The effect is to take existing particles near Earth -- not the ones that arrived from the Sun -- and accelerate them. It's like "pumping up the energy," another scientist said. These particles can slam into satellites and cause electrical shorts. They excite molecules in the atmosphere and create colorful lights called aurora. And they even induce electrical currents in wires on the ground.

A really strong storm can also compress Earth's magnetosphere to the extent that the highest satellites, those in geostationary orbits some 22,300 miles up, are suddenly outside the protective field "and are bombarded by solar wind particles too," says Paal Brekke, deputy project scientist for SOHO.

The magnetic orientation of the storm is determined when the flare erupts at the Sun. As Golub explains the complex physics, the eruption is turbulent, and there's "an untwisting of magnetic fields as the thing expands outward."

Nobody can tell which way the storm's magnetic field is pointed until it passes the ACE spacecraft, which is parked about a million miles from the Earth in a line toward the Sun. That gives about 30 minutes notice of the true potential of an oncoming beast.

Scientists are studying previous storms to see if their initial eruptive moments at the Sun yield clues about the magnetic orientation. "We're not there yet," Brekke said. And no satellites planned for launch anytime soon will help, though some longer-term projects could yield a better advance warning system.

Meanwhile, the SEC is the clearinghouse for what is known about these potentially damaging storms.

The SEC is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), parent also of the National Weather Service. It runs its Space Weather Operations Center in conjunction with the U.S. Air Force.

Funding cuts could force SEC operations to be moved to some other agency. But no agency has expressed a desire to take on the task or provide the funding.

"Services, data and observations, and archiving would all disappear if the final appropriation is at the Senate level," SEC Director Ernest Hildner has said. At the House funding level, he said, the SEC would lose about half its staff, "negatively affecting its ability to serve the nation."

Hildner is among a half-dozen scientists who will testify today before the Subcommittee on Environment, Technology, and Standards of the House Science Committee. He could not be reached for comment. The others who will testify include representatives of NASA and United Airlines, both customers of the SEC.

A final vote on the budget will be scheduled later.