Hi,

The short answer is, no. I do think it is confusing because the parts that make up weather on Earth (winds, temperatures, pressures) aren’t really the same things that make up space weather (magnetic fields, electrical currents, ionized particles), yet we use the same term ‘weather’.

The other thing to realize is that the Earth system, and therefore its weather, is really small compared to the system (the whole region that the Sun’s magnetic field and solar wind reaches - more than 100 times farther than the distance from the Sun to the Earth) that experiences space weather. So, it would be difficult for such a small system to have such an outsized impact on the huge system.

The primary cause of space weather is activity on the Sun. This can be flares or explosions of material we call coronal mass ejections. These events can disturb the environment going outward from the Sun and create what we call space weather. Sometimes this affects the Earth, sometimes it doesn’t (some coronal mass ejections aren’t traveling towards Earth and so don’t really have an effect).

-Christina