The Unseen Fury of Solar Storms
Credits Henry Wismayer is a writer based in London. I EXETER, United Kingdom — It was an overcast morning in southwest England, but Kirk Waite was staring at the sun. In the open-plan forecasting room of the Met Office, the U.K.’s national meteorological agency, the country’s senior weather-watchers were monitoring low-pressure systems sweeping in from the Atlantic and across the British Isles. Waite was studying weather of a very different sort. He sat at a crescent-shaped desk arrayed with