Peak Oil News and Message Boards

Lore wrote:The full effect I believe would depend on if we're facing the sun at the time of the flare and the angle. Could be the other side of the globe gets it on a 50/50 basis.

Pops wrote:Which makes one wonder at the end stage result of an increasingly sanctioned and isolated Russia.

Pops wrote:Karl, from your attitude you must be amazed people can figure out how to get out from under the sheets in the morning, LOL

Karle wrote:If some devices were hardened and survived the flare they would be useless anyway since everything is interconnected.

A pair of solar eruptions over the weekend have unleashed a severe geomagnetic storm that could disrupt power and communications Tuesday on Earth, US officials said.

The storm could grow into a G4 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scale of one to five, with five being the worst.

... "Possible widespread voltage control problems and some protective systems may mistakenly trip out key assets from the power grid," NOAA said in a space weather alert describing the storm.

High frequency radio may be sporadic or blacked out for hours, and satellite navigation systems may be "degraded or inoperable for hours," the federal agency added.

US residents as far south as Alabama and northern California could be able to see the resulting aurora—known as the Northern Lights—from the magnetic storm.

Arriving earlier than expected, a CME hit Earth's magnetic field on March 17th at approximately 04:30 UT. At first, the impact sparked a relatively mild G1-class (Kp=5) geomagnetic storm. Since then, however, the storm has intensified to G4-class (Kp=8), ranking it as the strongest geomagnetic storm of the current solar cycle. This storm is underway now. Before sunrise, bright auroras were sighted over several northern-tier US states including Minnesota, Wisconsin, Montana, the Dakotas and Washington.

This storm could continue for many hours to come as Earth passes through the turbulent wake of the CME. Stay tuned for updates.


http://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/au ... sphere.png

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/planetary-k-index

The K-index, and by extension the Planetary K-index, are used to characterize the magnitude of geomagnetic storms. Kp is an excellent indicator of disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field and is used by SWPC to decide whether geomagnetic alerts and warnings need to be issued for users who are affected by these disturbances.

The principal users affected by geomagnetic storms are the electrical power grid, spacecraft operations, users of radio signals that reflect off of or pass through the ionosphere, and observers of the aurora.

Solar wind flowing from the indicated coronal holes should reach Earth on March 19-20.

So far no damage has been reported. Two blasts of magnetic plasma left the sun on Sunday, combined and arrived on Earth about 15 hours earlier and much stronger than expected, said Thomas Berger, director of the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado.

This storm ranks a 4, called severe, on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 1-to-5 scale for geomagnetic effects. It is the strongest solar storm to blast Earth since the fall of 2013. It's been nearly a decade since a level 5 storm, termed extreme, has hit Earth.

Forecasters figured it would come late Tuesday night into Wednesday morning; instead, it arrived just before 10 a.m. EDT. They had forecast it to be a level 1.

"It's significantly stronger than expected," Berger said. Forecasters had predicted a glancing blow instead of dead-on hit. Another theory is that the combination of the two storms made it worse, but it's too early to tell if that's so, he said.

... Space Weather branch chief Brent Gordon said if the storm effects continued through Tuesday evening, there was a "very strong possibility" that the northern lights could be seen as far south as the middle United States, even Tennessee and Oklahoma. That also means much of Russia and northern Europe, as far south as central Germany and Poland, had the potential for the sky show.