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The Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre (Moswoc) is “one of a handful of 24/7 space weather prediction centres around the globe”, according to its website, and was set up in October 2014 after the 2011 edition of the National Risk Register included solar storms as a threat to the UK.

Moswoc says it “provides the vital information to help build the resilience of UK infrastructure and industries in the face of space weather events, thereby supporting continued economic growth”.

Threat posed by extreme space weather to CNI

The Met Office says extreme space weather “can have potentially significant impacts on the UK’s critical national infrastructure.”

Space weather is a normal occurrence because the sun is in “constant flux”, but elevated solar activity is made more visible now than it would have been in previous decades and centuries due to the increased reliance we have on technology and satellite such as global navigation satellite system (GNSS), like the US military’s Global Positioning System (GPS).

“Solar flares can cause high-frequency radio and GNSS to perform erratically, extreme CMEs (coronal mass ejections) can put power grids at risk. Therefore, space weather prediction is of crucial importance to power companies, satellite operators and the aviation industry,” Moswoc says.

4,000 notifications sent to CNI mangers since 2014

NCE previously reported that Moswoc had issued nearly 4,000 severe space weather notifications to CNI managers in the first 10 years after it was set up in 2014.

It can now be reported that Moswoc has issued 4,294 severe space weather notifications between October 2014 and December 2024 after NCE secured data from Moswoc via the Freedom of Information Act.

The notifications are roughly on a scale of severity and are classed as “watches”, “warnings” and “alerts”, with alerts being the most urgent and significant.

Watches are long lead time messages for potential increases in geomagnetic activity only, warnings are issued when “certain conditions are expected for a period of time” and alerts are issued “when an event threshold has been crossed”, according to the Met Office.

2017 saw the most alerts and warnings, while 2025 has already seen the most watches, despite only being seven months into the year.

In total, across all notification classes, 2017 was the most active year with 631 notifications issued.

However, at 420 notifications already, 2025 appears to be on track to be a record-breaking year for Moswoc severe space weather notices.

In 2025, 328 alerts have been issued, 86 warnings and 6 watches.

Space weather expert confirms 2025 set to be most active observed year on record

UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction visiting professor Ewan Haggarty told NCE that the Moswoc notifications align with expectations.

“2025 is with certainly going to be a year with a record number of alerts, watches and warnings issued by the Moswoc,” he confirmed. “There are two reasons for this.”

The first, he said, was because “the Moswoc was set up in 2014 during the last solar maximum of cycle 24. Cycle 25 is deemed to have started in December 2019, and were the one-year cycle wholly regular the peak of the cycle would be about now, but has not yet been ‘called’. There continues to be debate, and certainly the demonstrated activity level has been in excess of most predictions.”

The second reason is that “the peak of cycle 24, as determined by sunspot number, has already been comfortably passed in the current cycle 25, but using that as an index and scale for observed activity is inaccurate – the cumulative number of X-Flares, for example, is higher still,” Haggarty said.

According to the European Space Agency: “A solar flare is a tremendous explosion on thesSun that happens when energy stored in ‘twisted’ magnetic fields (usually above sunspots) is suddenly released.

“In a matter of just a few minutes, they heat material to many millions of degrees and produce a burst of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to X-rays and gamma rays.

“X-class flares are big; they are major events that can trigger radio blackouts around the whole world and long-lasting radiation storms in the upper atmosphere.”

How notifications align with expected activity in the 11-year solar cycle

Haggarty confirmed that the number and type of notifications issued by Moswoc aligned with what he expected, given the dates of the 11-year solar cycle.

“It is accurate to say that the incidence of Moswoc notifications is congruent with observed solar activity,” he said.

“The thresholds at which the alerts, watches and warnings are issued by the Moswoc have been carefully defined and I am aware that they have been selected in consultation with space weather forecast users with the aim of providing ‘actionable information’.”

Actionable information refers to the type of information which CNI managers need to be able to make decisions about their operations based on the level of threat posed by severe space weather.

“In partnership with NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), with whom the Space Weather Scales are aligned, there is effort being invested in making them less ‘sciency’,” Haggarty said.

He added that the collaboration between the UK space weather forecasting community and NOAA aims to provide notifications which are “more effectively discriminative for impacts to Earth-based and Near-Earth Space activities”.

Haggarty said it is not yet clear whether 2026 will see a subsidence in the level of space weather activity.

“As it is not clear yet that the Solar Maximum of Cycle 25 has been reached, it is not possible to say with certainty that overall activity will reduce in 2026,” he said.

“Observations of flare incidence from previous cycles suggests that these events may in any case continue at an elevated level.”

CNI managers not yet showing required ‘depth of awareness’ of space weather

Managers of CNI have not yet shown that they have the necessary “depth of awareness” needed to properly mitigate the risks posed by severe space weather, according to Haggarty.

“There is an increased awareness of the existence of a space weather threat to UK CNI,” he said.

“However, there have been ‘near misses’ where significant space weather interruption could have occurred rather than manifested problems where space weather was ‘the closest crocodile to the canoe’.

“As such, the depth of this ‘awareness’ and the capacity for effective mitigation has not been demonstrated in the theatre of actual practice.”

He added that “simulation and table-topping is extraordinarily difficult to do well and there is a possibility for a lot of structural and practical ‘unknown unknowns’ to remain undiscovered until ‘the real thing’ is experienced”.

Analysis of Moswoc notifications echoed by academic

Lancaster University professor of space physics Jim Wild corroborated the view that Moswoc’s alerts correlate with expected solar activity.

“I am not surprised that that the number of alerts is peaking around solar maximum,” he said.

Notifications issued between October 2014 and December 2024

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