Flares and CMEs can certainly cause damage to electronics or to astronauts. It is believed that the CPU outage that caused the loss-of-pointing of the Galaxy I

Flares and CMEs can certainly cause damage to electronics or to astronauts. It is believed that the CPU outage that caused the loss-of-pointing of the Galaxy IV satellite that in turn caused the giant pager outage in 1998 (about 80% of US pagers failed) was due to solar flares and CMEs. It's also conjectured that flares cause many other satellite electronics failures: http://books.google.com/books?id=nmdfazhEWzsC&pg=PA122&dq=pager+outage+galaxy+panamsat&hl=en&ei=EO_uTfKMLYWosQOS2ZmABw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=nmdfazhEWzsC&pg=PA122&#... The general phenomenon is called "Space Weather". There is a monitoring center in Boulder, CO, run by NOAA, called the Space Weather Prediction Center (http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/), that tries to predict and assess space weather. They use physical models and observational data, but it's not nearly as evolved a science as numerical weather prediction.