摘要：This summer the Boulder science community is commemorating the anniversaries of several key historical events in solar physics and space weather. Seventy-five years ago in 1940 Walter Orr Roberts helped establish the High-Altitude Observatory (HAO) in the mountains of Colorado near the small mining community of Climax. While the rationale for HAO was solar research, the daily observations made at HAO during World War II were essential to ensuring effective terrestrial radio communications. HAO eventually transitioned from Harvard University into a division within the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, where it continues to do cutting-edge research in solar, geophysics, and space physics. In 1955 the Central Radio Propagation Laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Centers for Environmental Information in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)) in Boulder published the first issue of the Solar-Geophysical Data (SGD) reports as a companion publication to the previously established publication of the Ionospheric Data reports. The numerous data sets included in the SGDs, or “Yellow Books” (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/solar/onlinepubl.html), provided a comprehensive retrospective assessment of the solar and near-Earth space environments starting with the years leading up to the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year. On 1 December 1965 the first ever Space Disturbance Forecast was issued by the Space Disturbance Forecast Center of the newly formed Environmental Science Services Administration that has now evolved into the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. Also, in 1965 the Upper Air Laboratory, founded in 1948 at the University of Colorado, Boulder, transitioned into the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) and expanded its evolving role from suborbital rocket-based solar observations to satellite-based measurements of the Sun and space. The breadth of work within LASP’s current portfolio includes participation in numerous NASA solar and planetary missions to identify and address key questions in solar influences, atmospheric, planetary, and space sciences. The year 2015 is also the first anniversary of the relocation to Boulder of the headquarters for the National Solar Observatory (NSO) which is responsible for building and operating (from Boulder) the future Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Maui, HI.
