Every few days or so, a magnetic field somewhere in the Sun’s corona snaps, flinging plasma out into space in enormous arcs. These solar events, called coronal mass ejections, can hit Earth’s magnetic field, creating beautiful auroras at the poles—and potentially wreaking havoc on spacecraft and power grids.
Heliophysicist Tanja Amerstorfer is using machine learning to better predict this kind of dramatic space weather. She’s the deputy head of the freshly founded Austrian Space Weather Office at GeoSphere Austria in Graz, where she and her colleagues are practitioners as well as theorists.
“It’s a combination of doing research and also forecasting,” Amerstorfer said. “We can really use the research we do for improving our models, improving something that has value for society. So I really like that.”
At first, Amerstorfer was more interested in Earth weather than space weather. She studied physics at the University of Graz and wanted to go into meteorology. That changed when a professor she admired offered her a master’s project on space weather. “Space weather was a rather small field when I started,” Amerstorfer said.
“You always try to build up a group, to not be a lonely fighter.”
Since then, Amerstorfer has spent her entire career in Graz—a choice she has made for her family but one that hasn’t always been easy, she said. In Europe, scientists are often expected to go abroad for at least part of their career, Amerstorfer said. A former boss even told her that it would be impossible to get a permanent position at their institute without having left home.
Cultivating a network of colleagues who support each other through the tougher points of a scientific career was key to landing her current role, said Amerstorfer.
For anyone considering a scientific career, “My message would be that you always try to build up a group, to not be a lonely fighter,” she said. “I think that’s a very important thing.”
—Elise Cutts (@elisecutts), Science Writer
This profile is part of a special series in our August 2024 issue on science careers.
Citation: Cutts, E. (2024), Tanja Amerstorfer: Forecasting space weather, Eos, 105, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EO240319. Published on 25 July 2024.
Text © 2024. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.
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