Any ship that ends its movement in a sector containing an ion storm suffers damage equal to the storm's rating. This damage is equivalent to attack damage from enemy ships, and can reduces a ship's OR, prevents doubled auto-repair, or destroy it in the same fashion.  If there are multiple ion storms present in the same sector, any ship in that sector suffers damage equal to the sum of all the storms' ratings.
 
Any deployed storm shield device will negate all ion storm damage to all friendly ships  in that sector for one turn.  Starbases confer the same protection from ion storms to friendly ships in the same sector in the same manner.
 
Allies: Any starbase or deployed storm shield automatically confers its ion storm protection to all allied ships in the same sector.