Solar storm

Solar storm strikes Earth following monster flare

A large coronal mass ejection has reached Earth – days after the Sun sent a massive burst of solar wind and electromagnetic radiation towards our planet. While causing no major geomagnetic storm, it has produced spectacular auroras in northern Europe.

RT.

10 January, 2014

The coronal mass ejection (CME) arrived near Earth at 2:32pm EST (7:32pm GMT) on Thursday, with its effects expected to continue throughout Friday, according to US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center has issued a warning of a geomagnetic storm with “minor disruptions to communications and GPS.”

While the world’s economies braced for possible blackouts in high-frequency airline and military communications, disruptions to GPS signals and power grids, enthusiasts in the northern hemisphere rushed outdoors in the hope of viewing the stunning aurora borealis as far south as Colorado.

However, American aurora spotters have been disappointed, as, according to spaceweather.com, the CME’s impact was “weaker than expected” and failed to produce widespread storms. Some frustrated Twitter users also blamed cloudy skies for not being able to see the northern lights.

Maninder Dhaliwal @dhaliwalmk

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Wow RT @EdPiotrowski: Harald Albrigsten captures the #aurora in all its glory tonight in Kvaløya, Norway.

7:22 PM - 10 Jan 2014

22 RETWEETS 12 FAVORIT

Observers were luckier around the Arctic Circle in Norway, where a dark and clear night at the time of impact, as well as more favorable latitude, put an aurora on display.

NOAA forecasters still estimated an 85 percent chance of polar geomagnetic storms before the end of Friday, and media cheered the sky watchers by saying there remains a chance of some clear aurora sightings Friday night.

The CME that stroke the Earth has been associated with the large X1.2-class solar flare that was unleashed from a giant sunspot AR1944 on January 7. The flare has been described as the most powerful this year so far, with X-class denoting the most severe intensity.

The solar phenomenon, which can send billions of tons of particles from the Sun’s atmosphere into space, is luckily not directly harmful for humans, as the Earth’s atmosphere prevents the particles from coming through. However, solar storms can affect electronic systems in satellites and on the ground, causing varying levels of disruption, and can potentially pose some danger to the astronauts orbiting the planet on board the International Space Station (ISS).

While NASA downplayed the possible impact of the current CME, saying it did not represent a threat to the ISS, the space weather concerns sparked a day-long delay of the Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket launch. The rocket successfully blasted in to space on Thursday, carrying the commercial cargo ship Cygnus with supplies for the ISS crew.

Scientists are expecting more solar flares to erupt, as the Sun is currently in an active phase of its 11-year solar weather cycle. The current one, known as Solar Cycle 24, started in 2008.

Possible magnetic storm

Massive solar eruption could cause magnetic storm here on Earth

Early Thursday morning, solar observers watched as a dark spot on the sun erupted with an enormous flash of light, causing the biggest solar flare of 2013.

LA Times,

11 April, 2013

Solar flares themselves don't last long, but this one was powerful enough to cause a bubble of solar material called a CME (coronal mass ejection) to come bursting off the sun.

Up to billions of tons of that solar material is now hurtling through space at the mind-bending speed of more than 600 miles per second, and it is heading directly toward Earth.

While a mass of solar material zooming toward Earth sounds kind of frightening, there's not much to worry about. CMEs can occasionally affect the electronic systems of satellites or the power grid here on the ground, but our atmosphere will protect us from any harmful radiation associated with the initial flare or the CME.

Plus, there's a major upside to these Earth-bound CMEs for sky watchers. When a CME interacts with the Earth's magnetosphere, it can cause geomagnetic storms and enhanced auroras that could be visible as far south as Michigan and New York.

Here in Southern California, we still won't be able to see them, but we'll look online for spectacular photos and videos of glowing green skies on the days after the CME hits.

Although Thursday morning's solar flare is the strongest to be recorded in 2013, NASA has classified it as a mid-level flare, and the agency notes that it was 10 times less powerful than the strongest flares, which are labeled X-class flares.

M-class flares are the weakest flares that can still cause effects on Earth. Thursday's solar flare was responsible for a brief radio blackout, NASA reported.

The sun is currently nearing the peak of its 11-year solar flare cycle, or what is known as solar max. At the peak of the cycle, it is normal for there to be several solar flares a day.

Young said we should expect more and larger solar flares 

Earth due for solar superstorm

A solar 'superstorm' is coming and we'll only get 30-minute warning

They cause devastation, occur every 150 years – and the last one was in 1859

the Independent,

7 February, 2013

A solar "superstorm" could knock out Earth's communications satellites, cause dangerous power surges in the national grid and disrupt crucial navigation aids and aircraft avionics, a major report has found.

It is inevitable that an extreme solar storm – caused by the Sun ejecting billions of tonnes of highly-energetic matter travelling at a million miles an hour – will hit the Earth at some time in the near future, but it is impossible to predict more than about 30 minutes before it actually happens, a team of engineers has warned.

Solar superstorms are estimated to occur once every 100 or 200 years, with the last one hitting the Earth in 1859.

Although none has occurred in the space age, we are far more vulnerable now than a century ago because of the ubiquity of modern electronics, they said.

"The general consensus is that a solar superstorm is inevitable, a matter not of 'if' but 'when?'," says a report into extreme space weather by a group of experts at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London.

In the past half century, there have been a number of "near misses" when an explosive "coronal mass ejection" of energetic matter from the Sun has been flung into space, narrowly bypassing the Earth.

In 1989 a relatively minor solar storm knocked out several key electrical transformers in the Canadian national grid, causing major power blackouts.

Similar solar storms significantly increased atmospheric radiation levels in 1956, 1972, 1989 and 2003, the experts found.

Professor Paul Cannon, who chaired the academy's working group on solar storms, said that the Government should set up a space weather board to oversee measures aimed at minimising the impact of solar storms.

"A solar superstorm will be a challenge but not cataclysmic. The two challenges for government are the wide spectrum of technologies affected today and the emergence of unexpected vulnerabilities as technology evolves," he said.

"Our message is, 'Don't panic, but do prepare'. A solar superstorm will happen one day and we need to be ready for it.

"Many steps have already been taken to minimise the impact of solar storms on current technology… We anticipate that the UK can further minimise the impact," he added.

Minor solar storms hit the Earth on a regular basis, but these are far less powerful than the 1859 event named after the British astronomer Richard Carrington, which was the last true solar superstorm.

A similar event today would put severe strain the electricity grid, where transformers are particular vulnerable to power surges, as well as degrading the performance of satellites, GPS navigation, aviation and possibly the mobile phone network, particularly the new 4G network, which relies on GPS satellites for timing information.

"Satellites are certainly in the front line of a superstorm. They are part of our infrastructure and we have concerns about their survival in a solar superstorm," said Keith Ryden, a space engineer at Surrey University.

Sun goes quiet

Days before 2013, Sun goes unpredictably quiet

Extinction Protocol,

29 December, 2012

December 30, 2012 –

2013 is only days away, and according to most forecasters, Solar Max should be approaching as well. But is it? Barely-increasing sunspot counts and anemic solar activity suggest an interesting possibility: Perhaps Solar Max is already here. (Below) This plot of measured vs. predicted sunspot numbers illustrates the idea: The blue curve traces monthly sunspot numbers measured since 2000. The red curve is the prediction of the NOAA-led Solar Cycle Prediction Panel. So far, Solar Cycle 24 is underperforming even compared to the panel’s low expectations. There is still a strong chance that Cycle 24 will rebound and peak in 2013 as expected. It might even be a double-peaked cycle like the cycle before it. As 2013 nears only one thing is certain: we don’t know what will happen. Stay tuned.

–Space Weather

Physicists find Sun is capable of producing super-storms and massive radiation bursts

Is this a case of science catching up?

Massive solar flare could have caused eighth century radiation burst

Nature,

28 November, 2012

A mysterious spike in atmospheric carbon-14 levels 12 centuries ago might be a sign the Sun is capable of producing solar storms dozens of times worse than anything we’ve ever seen, a team of physicists calculates in a paper published this week in Nature.

Carbon-14 (14C) is created when high-energy radiation strikes the Earth’s upper atmosphere, converting nitrogen-14 into 14C, which eventually makes its way into plants via photosynthesis.

Earlier this year, a team of Japanese physicists discovered a spike in 14C in tree rings of Japanese cedars dating from the 774–75 growing season. But they were unable to explain where that 14C might have come from because all possible explanations appeared unlikely.

But Adrian Melott, a physicist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, who is the lead author of the new study, says that the Japanese team made a miscalculation in ruling out one of these possibilities — a giant solar storm.

The problem, Melott says, is that the Japanese team treated solar storms as if they shone like light bulbs, radiating energy uniformly in all directions. But actually, they produce ‘blobs’ of energetic plasma that explode outwards unevenly. Adjusting for that, he says, reduces the size of the solar storm needed to produce the observed 14C spike from 1,000 times larger than anything known, to only 10–20 times larger — meaning that a giant solar storm is suddenly back on the table as a reasonable explanation.

Furthermore, observations by NASA’s Kepler space telescope have found that Sun-like stars are capable of generating superstorms of this type every few hundred to 1,000 years. This doesn’t mean the Sun does the same, “but it suggests it’s reasonable”, Melott says.

Other possible explanations for the spike seem unlikely. Radiation from a supernova explosion has enough power, but the supernova would have to have been within about 100 light years, Melott says. “Such an event would have been blindingly bright in the sky, much brighter than a full Moon. It would have been bright like that for months and could not have failed to be noted by every civilization on Earth.”

Another possibility is a gamma-ray burst from a more distant supernova. But such bursts are rare and produce searchlight-like beams of radiation unlikely to hit us. “I don’t think it’s likely,” Melott says.

If the 774–75 event was indeed a flare, it’s a disturbing find. Such a flare would be about 60 times more powerful than the 1989 solar storm that knocked out power to much of Quebec for nine hours on a cold winter night. Multiply that by 60 and add two decades of increased technological vulnerability, and the effects might be disastrous. “A lot of people could die,” Melott says. “You could have power out for months or longer — no refrigerated food, no food being transported to all the people who live in big cities.”

Solar flares and nuclear power

Professor: “Really disturbed” by recent solar flares — We could have lots of Fukushima-type events if one causes power blackout 

In the first half, theoretical physicist and popularizer of science, Dr. Michio Kaku, discussed the latest science stories in the news, including monster solar flares, and the search for dark matter. Lately, the sun has been throwing "temper tantrums," with some very large solar flares, he said, and as we head into the maximum of the sunspot cycle, "the fear is that one of these solar flares could hit the Earth," like the event that occurred in 1859, which fried telegraph wires. He also noted that the asteroid Apophis could be a threat to our planet when it flies by in 2029, and again in 2036, though the odds have diminished somewhat that it will be a direct hit.

Regarding parallel universes, string theory might eventually prove their existence in other dimensions, he said. As to the concept of the "multiverse," our universe could be considered like a bubble, and there could be other bubbles existing in a kind of bubble bath, he explained, and sometimes these bubbles bump into each other resulting in something like the Big Bang. What existed before the Big Bang? "We should find evidence of an 'umbilical cord'...perhaps connecting our universe to a parallel universe," he posited. NASA is considering launching LISA, a laser space antenna that could reveal data of our cosmological origins, he reported.

Beyond the Higgs, he spoke about the next set of particles that could be discovered by the Large Hadron Collider. Called sparticles or super particles, they are "the next octave on the string," invisibly vibrating on a higher level, he said. These sparticles may be what dark matter is, he added. Dr. Kaku also talked about reports of rogue planets, as well as wandering black holes, which could pose grave dangers to a solar system.

http://enenews.com/professor-really-disturbed-solar-flares-week-could-lots-fukushima-type-events-around-one-power-blackout-all-hell-could-break-lose-video

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2012/11/20

To listen to the show GO HERE or HERE

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PODCAST: NOVEMBER 21, 2012; THANKSGIVING EDITION: FINANCIAL PRESSURES ARE AFFECTING SAFETY DECISIONS AT THE NATIONS NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS

Arnie Gundersen explains that Oyster Creek is the only nuclear plant in the US that lacks a modern High Pressure Safety Injection System.  This means that the recently discovered pipe crack in a 3 inch pipe at Oyster Creek would create a serious safety threat if it were to completely break.  Arnie also discusses the cost of operating nuclear plants, and how many nuclear plants around the country are no longer a low cost electric producer.  Finally, Arnie looks at the three nuclear plants with extended shutdowns (Ft. Calhoun, San Onofre and Crystal River) and concludes that the cost of maintaining 

To hear podcast GO HERE

Earth changes

Tension mounts: Chile shaken by 7 moderate quakes in 24 hours

Time,

22 November, 2012

A strong 5.9-magnitude earthquake shook central Chile on Wednesday, causing office buildings in the capital to sway for almost a minute but authorities said no damage was reported and ruled out the possibility of tsunami along its coast.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake’s epicenter was 37 miles (59 kilometers) southwest of the port city of San Antonio, Chile. It struck at 6:36 p.m. local time. The USGS had reported the quake as magnitude 6.1 but revised the strength down to 5.9.

Buildings swayed in Santiago and some people fled to the streets in fear. Chile’s emergency services office said no damages to infrastructure were immediately reported.

The USGS reported two other temblors with magnitudes of 5.1 and 5.2 on Wednesday near San Antonio.

Chile is highly earthquake-prone and residents have bad memories of other quakes that have caused widespread destruction.

In 2010, a devastating 8.8-magnitude quake, one of the strongest recorded, and the tsunami it unleashed, killed 551 people, destroyed 220,000 homes and washed away docks, riverfronts and seaside resorts. The disaster cost Chile $30 billion, or 18 percent of its annual gross domestic product.

M-class solar flares erupts from volatile region on the Sun

  

November 21, 2012 – SUN - The magnetic canopy of big sunspot AR1618 is crackling with M-class solar flares. This image taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the extreme ultraviolet flash from one of them, an M1.6-class flare on Nov. 20th at 1928 UT: This eruption, and another one like it about 7 hours earlier, might have propelled faint coronal mass ejections (CMEs) toward Earth. If so, the impacts would likely commence on Nov. 23rd, with a chance of high-latitude geomagnetic storms following their arrival.

– Space Weather

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'Mordor volcano' erupts in New Zealand

Massicve solar flare

Sun unleashes strong X 1.4 class solar flare

Extinction Protocol,

 July 12, 2012 

 

July 12, 2012 –SPACE 

– Big sunspot AR1520 unleashed an X1.4-class solar flare on July 12th at 1653 UT. Because the sunspot was directly facing Earth at the time of the blast, this is a geoeffective event. 

 

Stay tuned for updates about possible CMEs and radio blackouts. 

 

The UV and X-ray pulse from the flare will have partially ionized Earth’s upper atmosphere on the dayside of our planet, disturbing the normal propagation of radio signals.

–Space Weather

    

X1.4 Solar Flare + CME

The silence is broken! A major and long duration eruption reaching X1.4 around Sunspot 1520 peaked at 16:52 UTC Thursday afternoon. Type II and IV Sweep Frequency Events were recorded. This event was also responsible for a Strong R3 Radio Blackout on the sunlit side of Earth. A Coronal Mass Ejection was also produced and looks to be Earth directed.

Solar Storms

Amongst everything else....

'Monster sunspot' spurs solar storm warning

NASA says region threatens to unleash more powerful flares; one already headed toward Earth

MSNBC

8 May, 2012

An enormous sunspot group has taken shape on the surface of the sun, hinting that our star may soon start spouting off some powerful storms.

The huge sunspot complex, known as AR 1476, rotated into Earth's view over the weekend. It measures more than 60,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) across, researchers said. Scientists with NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory mission, a space-based telescope watching the sun, dubbed the solar structure a "monster sunspot" in a Twitter announcement.

AR 1476 is big enough for amateur astronomers with decent equipment to spot from their backyards, weather permitting. (Warning: Never look at the sun directly with telescopes or the unaided eye. Special filters are required for safe solar viewing to avoid serious eye damage.)

"With at least four dark cores larger than Earth, AR 1476 sprawls more than 100,000 km from end to end, and makes an easy target for backyard solar telescopes," the website Spaceweather.com reported Monday.

Sunspots are temporary dark patches on the surface of the sun that are caused by intense magnetic activity. These structures sometimes erupt into solar flares, which send high-energy radiation streaming into space.

Solar physicists classify flares into three main categories: C, M and X, with C being the least powerful and X the strongest. X-class flares can cause long-lasting radiation storms in Earth's upper atmosphere and trigger radio blackouts.

M-class flares can cause brief radio blackouts in the polar regions and occasional minor radiation storms, while C flares have few noticeable consequences.

AR 1476 has already proven quite active, firing off a number of C flares over the past few days.

And another sunspot group, AR 1471, erupted Monday evening with a flare that seems to be an M1, one of the least powerful M flares, according to Spaceweather.com.

Big solar flares are often associated with coronal mass ejections, massive clouds of solar plasma that streak through space at millions of miles per hour. If these clouds hit Earth, they can wreak havoc, spawning geomagnetic storms that can disrupt GPS signals, radio communications and power grids.

CMEs also often super-charge the northern and southern lights, providing dazzling shows for skywatchers at high latitudes.

Monday evening's eruption from AR 1471 apparently generated an Earth-directed CME, which should hit Earth sometime Wednesday morning, Eastern time, researchers said.

After remaining surprisingly quiet from 2005 through 2010, our star began waking up last year, spouting off numerous powerful flares and CMEs.

Most experts expect such outbursts to continue over the next year or so.

Solar activity waxes and wanes on an 11-year cycle, and scientists think the current one — known as Solar Cycle 24 — will peak in 2013.