Timing of Geomagnetic Storms Shapes Their Impact

Editorsโ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGUโs journal editors.
Source: AGU Advances
Solar eruptions can trigger geomagnetic storms that disrupt satellites, GPS, and power grids, affecting daily activities and technology. Therefore, it is extremely important to understand these storms in order to mitigate their impact. Previous studies mainly focused on interplanetary conditions.
Ghag et al. [2026] investigate the interaction between solar ultraviolet light (EUV) during storms and the Earth magnetic field, taking into account its misalignment and offset with respect to the Earthโs rotational axis, which depend on time. Such misalignment and offset induce variations in EUV exposure in turn influencing the ionosphere and its interaction with the magnetosphere.
The study applies the Multiscale Atmosphere-Geospace Environment (MAGE), a physics based fully coupled whole geospace model. The causal relationship between storm timing and storm effect is explored revealing insights on our capability to predict storm impact based on the time dependent Earth system state.

Citation: Ghag, K., Lotko, W., Pham, K., Lin, D., Merkin, V., Raghav, A., & Wiltberger, M. (2026). Universal time influence on stormtime magnetosphere ionosphere coupling. AGU Advances, 7, e2025AV002071. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002071
โAlberto Montanari, Editor-in-Chief, AGU Advances