Largest space weather storm in at least four years

I’m surprised that Gore, Hansen, Monbiot, et al, haven’t claimed that man-made CO2 is the cause of the solar flare and mass ejection. /sarc

Let’s not forget that Dan Baker and his organization in Boulder get it’s funding through NOAA with the rationale of trying to avoid the impending “apocalypse” of solar events. See the recent cover article of the otherwise objective Sky and Telescope magazine to see how far these organizations will go to spectacularize the importance of these solar events. Ho Hum. How bad off would we really be if we didn’t funnel any more research $$$$$$ into this area? This is the weakest solar max in memory, but yet the press is full of dire predictions of the end of days. Ok, so solar flares are annoying, but let’s get some perspective.

It’s probably my fault. Trying to do what global warming cannot which is to remove the moss growing on the north side of it, I washed my Jeep this week. There’s a reason Seattle is called Emerald City, and it’s not because we’re crazy about CFL lamps. We have moss on the north side of everything here. I have an asphalt driveway and its never been so green.
So, sorry, folks – blame me.
Sadly, we have no aurora activity despite my best effort 🙁

Notice that the Planetary A is still non-existent also:
http://www.solen.info/solar/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/07/suns-magnetic-index-reaches-unprecedent-low-only-zero-could-be-lower-in-a-month-when-sunspots-became-more-active/
If the Ap is more predictive than sunspots as some believe, then added cold is still on schedule, not that the AGW/NASA types will notice.

Wasn’t there some pretty major mass ejection on the other side of the sun quite some time ago… it just did not come our way.

In the late 1800’s an x-flare about 100x as large caused telegraph wires to FRY and caused FIRES. Back then there was no radio, just telegraph. And there was no electrical infrastructure. A flare that big now would BURN OUT EVERY POLE TRANSFORMER ON EARTH from the induction caused in the wires feeding them. Not to mention the damage to generators getting over-amped. Experts say it would take 10 YEARS to recover. Imagine what it would do to your TV, cars computer chips or your PC

Jim @ 8:41
I think that is just a headline added by the Univ’s PR folks.
Prof. Baker doesn’t seem to be say the events so far are extremely dangerous.

More NASA type hype from those looking for future funding….this is not much better than the AGW rubbish we have to put up with.

Off topic but… The U.S. House just voted to defund the IPCC.
Kforestcat

No light show at 53,122. Clear and a cold 23c below gore. I read David Suzuki is in Australia on some sort of a junket. Interesting to bail out of a west coast Canadian winter riding his carbon credits on a tax deductable trip down under. Looking for some warming I guess.

@Craig, markinaustin:
Yes, it was real (although I’m not sure about the 100x). It’s generally known as the Carrington Event.
/relurk

markinaustin says:
February 18, 2011 at 10:22 pm
“is that true craig? that’s horrifying! and how unusual are flares that size?”
Technically inaccurate but true. The year was 1859 and it wasn’t a flare it was a coronal mass ejection (CME). CME’s are often associated with flares but aren’t the same thing. A CME is an ejection of a huge cloud of charged particles which take a day or three to reach the earth’s orbit depending on how fast they are moving. If it happens to hit the earth and it’s a big one then some very bad things can happen. In pre-industrial times about the only effect anyone would find noteworthy is the Aurora Borealis can be seen from lower latitudes than normal. In 1859 it could be seen in Florida and Mexico for instance. It melted telegraph lines and started fires in telegraph offices. Basically anything metal acts like an antenna and takes on an electric cloud as the CME streams past. It works by induction – a magnetic field moving past a conductor causing an electrical current to flow in the conductor – transformers, generators, and electric motors work by induction. In practical terms the longer the antenna the more electricity is generated. For short conductors it isn’t much but for miles of electrical wire like telegraph lines it can be quite a lot of energy. For the modern electrical grid it could be catastrophic as large transformers connected to miles of grid wires would burn up. Those large transformers take a long time to build and aren’t inventoried in any significant number. It would take years to replace them and in the meantime electrical power distrubtion would cease causing all kinds of havoc. Water would stop flowing from taps, sewers would cease to function, gas pumps couldn’t pump fuel up out of underground tanks, no refrigeration, no heating, no air conditioning, no power for hospitals, etcetera. It would take months just to get basic emergency services, food, water, and fuel distribution functioning at a minimal level.
With a modicum of advance warning that a large CME was coming the electric grid can be shut down and the big transformers electrically isolated to reduce the damage but it still wouldn’t be pretty and could potentially trash an entire hemisphere’s electrical distribution.
No one knows how often big ones like the 1859 happens or how big they can get. Maybe that one was a once-a-million-year thing or maybe they happen statistically once per century and another is overdue. Maybe they get hugely larger and come once every thousand years like nearby supernovas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

Dave Springer says ‘maybe a once in a million year thing’……
Not at all. There are records in the ice-cores that show the major atmospheric changes that accompany such mega-flares (and Carrington was a flare, which he saw, followed by a CME, which of course, he did not know about other than from the magnetic disturbances on Earth). The ice-core record shows mega-flares not to be that unusual – somewhere between 1:200 and 1:500 years frequency. The solar cycle in 1859 was not that unusual (Leif – have you studied that event for any signs of why we can get such huge flares?). There are signs in the ice-record also that the glacial termination was a time of greatly disturbed solar activity.
It is worth reflecting on how modern science and technology has built an edifice of civilisation so utterly dependent upon electricity for transport and communication that the whole thing could grind to a halt within minutes. The National Academy of Science 2008 report on the issue, plus the hearings in Congress, make stark reading – the US would be able to feed only 10% of its population in the aftermath. No pumps for water supplies, or for sewage. No food in the supermarkets after three days. No radio, TV or newspapers. Only military and police/civil emergency networks are hardened against EMP.
Why did nobody see this coming? I guess they were all too concerned about global warming!

I do remember reading that the sun has a habit of nasty large discharges when it is most quiet. It will now sonambulate if we get a really big wacking the best laid plans of mice and men will come to nought. Solar panels and wind turbines would be toast, the grid has been hardened for this and some may survive. The cable system using light should be OK as the wireless devices being unconnected should also survive. Getting the power back on may take a while. Hopefully those who designed our com satellites know what they are doing .

Spaceweather is very cool, but to act as if solar storms are a huge issue is like thinking Greenland melt is going to be a problem in your lifetime – overblown concerns and done for scientific monetary gain.

The headline may prove to incorrect. Its not over yet but so far we had a bigger impact on Earth (going by the aurora) last year when two rather insignificant unipolar groups came together.

@Peter
The 1859 CME was unusual in that it followed in the path of another CME which cleared the way allowing the second CME to make the journey in just 18 hours instead of the usual 3 days. The higher velocity amplified the induction as it moved across telegraph wires.
CMEs are often associated with solar flares but the flares are not causally connected to the CME and CMEs sometimes come out of a quiet region of the sun.
I can’t find any ice core record of CMEs going back more than 500 years. The 1859 event was singularly powerful during that period of time so unless there is data going back much farther it’s simply not possible to establish a frequency for events of that magnitude from a sample size of one event. Graph of ice core NOx (spikes indicate CMEs) data for the past 500 years:
http://sunearthday.gsfc.nasa.gov/2010/images/ttt70-fig3.jpg

Mike Jonas says:
February 19, 2011 at 4:07 am
“Dave Springer : “The year was 1859 and it wasn’t a flare it was a coronal mass ejection (CME).””
“Isn’t a CME (actually 3 CMEs) what we are getting now???”
Yes. Solar flares in and of themselves are dangerous in that they emit proton streams travelling at the speed of light. These aren’t dangerous on the surface of the earth (atmosphere protects us from them) but can be lethal for astronauts and they have only 8 minutes from observation of the flare to arrival of the protons. So the proton stream from the big flare passed us a few days ago. CMEs travel at only a tiny fraction of the speed of light and have intense magnetic fields associated with them. The magnetic fields are not attenuated by the atmosphere and those are what cause the high currents on electric tranmission lines. A CME (or a series of them) emerged around the same time as the flare. Those lagged behind the proton stream although I thought they too had passed through last night although there might be more of them as I haven’t been following the story very close. CMEs can happen without flares and sometimes from regions devoid of sunspots altogether. No one is sure of the mechanism which spawns them only that they are spawned more frequently when other surface disturbances such as sunspots and flares are visible.

Dave Springer says:
February 19, 2011 at 2:33 am

Water would stop flowing from taps, sewers would cease to function, gas pumps couldn’t pump fuel up out of underground tanks, no refrigeration, no heating, no air conditioning, no power for hospitals, etcetera.

Dave,
You’re only covering part of the implications a CME
like the Carrington Event of September 1, 1857, would have on
today’s world:
You need to add the collapse of the world monetary system and
all it’s little parts, together with all forms of electronic banking
transactions shutting down. Your credit cards won’t work, so you
have to have cash to buy anything. However, you can’t get any
money out of your checking/banking accounts… which are all
electronically maintained.
There will be no automatic mailings of retirement and dividend
checks, and probably no mail service to get them to you if they
could be issued. There will be no direct deposits, and no
automatic payments made for mortgages, utilities, and other
accounts owed.
Grocery and other food source stores will be a huge problem
for suburban/urban dwellers. There will be a limited distribution
of goods to start with and you will personally have a tough time
just getting to the stores. Maybe if you can get
to the stores, they might accept green foldy cash
in return for food. Remember, they might accept cash, but they
can’t deposit it at their banks.
Unless you’ve stored a home generator in a Faraday cage, and
stocked fuel for it ahead of time, you won’t be able to refridgerate
any perishables. Neither will the stores. Yum.
If you are personally, physically holding gold or silver bullion or coins,
you might be OK. However, if you have precious metals in a holding
account, you won’t be able to get to it.
On the other hand, you won’t get bills in the mail
or be able to file your taxes.

Our sun is beautiful!

Short solar cycle -> WARM
Long solar cycle -> COLD
It’s as simple as that. More RPM, more power.

Leif, are you member of the Team?
Just joking.

Leif, what is the difference between theirs and your analysis? I will look into it tonight, but on the first sight, SCL raw data is different, not only filtering.
Also, that HADCRU temp is a bit on the warm side, 40’s were for sure not ~0,4 degrees warmer than 90s, IMO.

For a general description of the first solar flare ever observed, see for example:
Other Discoveries from Carrington’s Flare
Regarding the danger of the present activity, I’m with Leif, just enjoy the show. Somebody switched on the Sun again and the spectacle is marvelous. And just think that Cycle XXIII (the one before) was extremely active. During the week from 27 OCT to 4 NOV 2003 we have had many X, and uncountable number of M class flares. In fact the Solar Corona at Soft-X Ray had a C class level background (as usual in astronomy there is no logic in classification: from weaker to stronger A, B, C, M and X). On 4 NOV, the most intense flare of the satellite era saturated the GOES Soft X-rays telescopes and produced a strong CME (since it was a limb event, the CME went off the Earth). We survived to all of that, electric systems, banking, even GPS and communication satellites…
Does anybody has a reference about the present consequences of an 1859 flare-like? I only saw an interview to Michio Kaku in a TV Show. I’m a little bit skeptic.

Leif Svalgaard says:
February 19, 2011 at 9:29 am
“…but again it matters not much.”
Well obviously it matters very much.
Wouldn’t you say that correlation between SCL (filtered) and NH temp as in fig. 2 in F-C & L (1991) is striking?
Even unfiltered SCL show correlation.

“Here is an unfiltered version:
http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%20Lengths%20and%20Temperatures.png
Note that in 1750-1800 it was cold.”
Hmm… Solar cycle 17 years long!
I am not sure what you are trying to say, the alleged correlation is negative (long cycles, cold climate).
Even in your unfiltered version there is negative correlation until mid 70s.
After that, the official temperature records are overestimated (UHI and confirmation/selection bias mostly), IMO.

The sun has entered a very quiet phase overall-the maxima of solar cycle 24 may be spurts of high activity-but likely not the sustained periods of high activity weve seen in the past. Stereo behind images show the other side of sun facing away from Earth very quiet with just one region just coming into view. The sun will likely go back to being quiet in a week or two. Activity also spiked a year ago when the SFI index rose to 96.