National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the Sun reaches its maximum power in a few years.
Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
In a new warning, Nasa said the super storm would hit like “a bolt of lightning” and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world’s health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken.
Scientists believe it could damage everything from emergency services’ systems, hospital equipment, banking systems and air traffic control devices, through to “everyday” items such as home computers, iPods and Sat Navs.
Due to humans’ heavy reliance on electronic devices, which are sensitive to magnetic energy, the storm could leave a multi-billion pound damage bill and “potentially devastating” problems for governments.
“We know it is coming but we don’t know how bad it is going to be,” Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa’s Heliophysics division, said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.
“It will disrupt communication devices such as satellites and car navigations, air travel, the banking system, our computers, everything that is electronic. It will cause major problems for the world.
“Large areas will be without electricity power and to repair that damage will be hard as that takes time.”
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859 they say under History that “Ice cores show evidence that events of similar intensity recur at an average rate of approximately once per 500 years. Since 1859, less severe storms have occurred in 1921 and 1960, when widespread radio disruption was reported.”
So is it 150 years, we’re overdue; or 500 years and we have nothing to worry about?
Les Francis:
Thanks for some good information Les.
Solar Storm Threat Analysis
Found it curious that we receive one large SPE ever 2.9 mean years (154 in 450). When I was very young I remember hearing of radio blackouts a couple of times, that must be these large SPE events. Interesting.
That’s a good bit of what I was looking for, thanks again for finding this.
Oh, BTW, shores up that any damage to satellites is degradation if under shielded and comes from high energy protons and other ions. That makes sense, not induce voltage and current causing it to literally “burn out”. In NASA’s word above it was ‘disrupt’ not ‘destroy’, at least that word proved correct. Here we go with another “possibly could occur with damage” Y2K or a “it will happen one day but don’t know if it’s tomorrow or 300 years from now”, we’ll get small ones every few years but wait for that big one. Brother!
But it does sound like they need to handle that small problem with the grid and tying one leg of the high-voltage 3-phase power lines to earth. Never knew they did that on the big scale. After learning that it’s the induced current within the Earth that is the real culprit, that does seem problematic. That’s the same problem you get with lightning if you incorrectly ground your house, only BIG.
Wish they wouldn’t just wait till it “trips”, if people had a way to be warned and knew it was on it’s way most would just turn unnecessary big power items off.
_Jim says:
June 17, 2010 at 3:02 pm
A comparison is made between EMP and natural phenomena such as lightning. This paper concludes that EMP is no more harmful to the power grid than its counterparts in nature.
Did you see the image I posted with the burned out transformer?
A nuclear explosion contain less energy than a hurricane. Lightning is a spark compared to a big solar flare.
LightRain says:
June 17, 2010 at 9:51 pm
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859 they say under History that “Ice cores show evidence that events of similar intensity recur at an average rate of approximately once per 500 years. Since 1859, less severe storms have occurred in 1921 and 1960, when widespread radio disruption was reported.”
So is it 150 years, we’re overdue; or 500 years and we have nothing to worry about?
Probably depends whether you work out the odds on a random basis or whether you agree with NASA scientist Ching Cheh Hung that solar flares etc tend to occur when planets are right overhead. Perhaps Leif can explain…
tallbloke says:
June 17, 2010 at 11:05 pm
Probably depends whether you work out the odds on a random basis or whether you agree with NASA scientist Ching Cheh Hung that solar flares etc tend to occur when planets are right overhead. Perhaps Leif can explain…
Put on your tin-foil hat when the planets are in certain positions. There is no credible evidence for any of that. There are millions of flares and microflares in a solar cycle and you can find some to coincide with anything you want. Conversely, there are plenty of combinations of alignments so you can easily find something that coincides with those. NASA and the Space Weather Agencies thankfully do not employ astrology in their forecasts of solar activity.
Still can’t find how it’s suppose to burn out satellites. Also it is curious that apparently no satellites were damaged in the 1989 CME that brought the grid down, maybe the circuitry is more robust in the older satellites.
Galaxy 15 took a solar flare related hit just this past April
http://sxi.ngdc.noaa.gov/sxi_greatest.html
http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/Astronomy/story/31455/galaxy-15-problems.asp
There are several ways that CME can damage spacecraft. One is differential charging in the plasma environment where one part of the spacecraft is suddenly at a much higher potential than the rest of the bird and ZAP.
Another is through enhanced radiation, especially in GEO. When a CME happens the Earth’s magnetosphere contracts, sometimes radically. During quiet times the bowshock is out at over 100,000 miles from the planet. However, during a storm the bowshock can be compressed to below GEOSync altitudes (~33,600 km). This can bring a lot of enhanced proton radiation into the spacecraft, causing single event upsets, latch ups (radiation induced shorts in a silicon substrate that destroy a chip), and overall degredation of critical systems such as solar arrays and other hardware.
Exact numbers vary as some spacecraft (military) are protected through parts selection, design considerations, and ability to ramp down operations during a major blast. Commercial spacecraft are not as well protected but here is a number that I know. The GEO environment in 1 MEV equivalent fluence is about 10^12 (my memory may be faulty on the exponent and I don’t remember the other units.
The total dose that a spacecraft gets in GEO during a 15 year lifetime is about 50 kilorads where a LEO spacecraft gets about 30 kilorads. This can be accumulated in a single day of a really big storm. I would expect that after reading about the Aurora being visible in Cuba that a commercial bird would probably get its lifetime total dose in an hour. Military spacecraft are qualified into the megarads (exact numbers are usually classified) but even this dose would probably be absorbed in a day or two.
So yes Virginia, the 1859 Carrington event would strike a major blow to our space based assets.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 17, 2010 at 11:21 pm
tallbloke says:
June 17, 2010 at 11:05 pm
Probably depends whether you work out the odds on a random basis or whether you agree with NASA scientist Ching Cheh Hung that solar flares etc tend to occur when planets are right overhead. Perhaps Leif can explain…
Put on your tin-foil hat when the planets are in certain positions. There is no credible evidence for any of that. There are millions of flares and microflares in a solar cycle and you can find some to coincide with anything you want. Conversely, there are plenty of combinations of alignments so you can easily find something that coincides with those. NASA and the Space Weather Agencies thankfully do not employ astrology in their forecasts of solar activity.
NASA scientist Ching Cheh Hung’s analysis is statistically significant. But without getting into that debate again, as we’ve done it to death before on other threads here, how did you arrive at your 150 year estimate you gave us last time? Obviously via a method more rigorous than Ching Cheh Hung’s analysis, or you wouldn’t be calling him out as an astrologer, would you?
Joe Bastardi isn’t buying it either.
“Run, Hide, the Sun Is Coming to Get You (If You Trust NASA)”
http://www.accuweather.com/video/96827541001/run-hide-the-sun-is-coming-to-get-you-%28if-you-trust-nasa%29.asp?channel=vbbastaj
NASA should say that they don’t have a clue when the large solar storm which hits populated areas on the Earth will occur, only that it may should occur at any century.
tallbloke, are you sure that Svalgaard said something like “a flare might be expected to hit Earth once every 150 years or so”? That it occurred 150 years ago doesn’t indicate a periodicity. It might happen two times within a few decades, or it might take hundreds of years of time before it happens again. I guess it may happen in a few months or in a few centuries, stochastically as one number from a tombola.
It’s okay that an organization like NASA mention the risk, and asks us to take precautionary actions. Such warnings must not be a fund raising alarm, and they should be made by NASA. But this warning was unfortunately connected to this particular sunspot cycle. I agree with Stephen Wilde’s comment June 17 4:35 am.
The location of the next large solar flare to hit the Earth is also a non-predictable, stochastic variable. This is both good news and bad news. It’s good because it may take several hundreds of years before a catastrophe, and bad because it might happen tomorrow. But it’s good that nature rejects all prophets. 🙂
If NASA asks for funding they should actually avoid to mention any specific sunspot cycle, and just mmention that they want money to be able to make predictions. The way the’re doing this they undermine fund raising capability after 2013. 😉 I think actions should be taken in businesses — whether it happens in 500 years or in 1 years — to prevent losses from destroyed computer systems and extended times of failed power supply. Predictions — maybe impossible… — are good only if they enable us to prevent losses.
Is this similar to the meteorite problem? Not exactly. Sooner or later we start to take some actions against both threats. However, when the prevention from meteorites needs — like the development of fusion power… — tax funds, information on the problem with solar flares should be enough to encourage businesses to built in protection in their systems. Solutions for a fast recovery of energy supply — e.g. network solutions, as well as strategical cable storage — may be enabled by decisions in that business…
If strong solar flares are also common during extended periods of low sunspot activity, isn’t our vulnerability also higher these periods when the heliosphere is smaller?
Correction: Not a smaller heliosphere, but that Earth’s magnetic field is weaker… 😉
MA says:
June 18, 2010 at 2:23 am
NASA should say that they don’t have a clue when the large solar storm which hits populated areas on the Earth will occur, only that it may should occur at any century.
tallbloke, are you sure that Svalgaard said something like “a flare might be expected to hit Earth once every 150 years or so”?
My memory is far from perfect. Here is the exchange which made me think Leif said 150 years. In fact, Maksimovich said possibly a 1 in 200 year event, which Leif seemed to go along with, pointing out it could happen any time.
Leif Svalgaard says:
March 25, 2009 at 10:24 pm
Lee (21:53:00) :
That’s the diffusion issue, if it is spread thin enough to hit us, is it still thick enough to do any harm. So far, 100 years of electronics, minimal harm. Inverse square law can do a lot of thinning at 93 million miles.
Yes it can still do a lot of harm. On 13 March 1989, the voltage of Quebec’s power grid began to fluctuate alarmingly. Seconds later, the lights went out across the entire province. Some 6 million people were without electricity for nine hours. Within two days, NASA had lost track of some of its spacecraft and the northern lights were glowing in the sky south of London. As described in the 3 February 1996 issue of The New Scientist, these events had the same cause – a monumental Solar Storm, the fiercest for 30 years. The 1859 flare was many times stronger.
maksimovich (22:10:29) :
If SEP follow the Gleissberg cycle eg McCracken 2001b and they obey a power law due to the streaming limit,would not a Carrington event be a rare possibility ?(say a 1 in 200 year event)
Which can still happen anytime. And it was 150 years ago …
Well Nasa must need funds for solar study…
If you need them, as usual, make some scary scenarios
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmPSUMBrJoI&hl=es_ES&fs=1&]
We need cool heads and electrical engineers here.
The Carrington event took 18 hours to arrive on earth, instead of the usual 3 or 4 days ( according to wiki). This is plenty of time to give warning to turn off vulnerable electric equipment the world over.
If some electrical engineer puts some thoughts and numbers together easy to make Faraday cages for home equipment etc could be devised. I would think aluminum foil, but do not know the power and frequencies of the pulse arriving.
If the pulse coming is such that even inert circuits can become activated by it, like power lines, again an electrical engineer can design grounding points on the grid to deflect the power. This needs forethought, and should be incorporated in the design of power grids.
No need for panic.
tallbloke says:
June 18, 2010 at 3:33 am
“Which can still happen anytime. And it was 150 years ago …”
1859 was indeed some 150 years ago…
But that doesn’t mean that every 150 years we are hit by such a flare.
There are a fair number of these events; http://www.solarstorms.org/SRefStorms.html that occur, one or two solar rotations after a critical alignment of inner planets, this could explain why apparently looking a month ahead from current conditions was outperforming Nelson`s (RCA) planetary ordered forecasts at times.
A good number though, are on well defined planetary alignments, including the superstorm of 1859, centered at early 29th August; http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Solar/action?sys=-Sf
Note the tight Saturn/Mars/Venus line, within hours of, at 160deg. away, Mercury/Earth/(and Ceres-not visible here) square to Uranus.
It would not be fair to say that 23yr monthly temperature anomaly string observable in CET, is a proxy for a half cycle of Mercury transits (46yr), as the months concerned can be seen to occur at Earth/Ceres syzygies, away from Mercury.
Ceres can also be seen to be causing strong uplifts in solar activity when in closer alignment with Mercury and Venus together, such as from 1st April 2010, and a slightly weaker one, mid November 2009, that caused the second main spate of floods last year.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 18, 2010 at 4:47 am
tallbloke says:
June 18, 2010 at 3:33 am
“Which can still happen anytime. And it was 150 years ago …”
1859 was indeed some 150 years ago…
But that doesn’t mean that every 150 years we are hit by such a flare.
Thanks Leif, I think we established that.
In fact, Maksimovich said possibly a 1 in 200 year event, which Leif seemed to go along with, pointing out it could happen any time.
The sense of meaning I took away from this, was that you were implying that if Maksamovich’s once in 200 years was ballpark, we were 3/4 of the way through that period since the Carrington event, and anyway, and Earthbound event could occur anytime.
The Carrington event took place at the top of the upswing of a cycle which as you pointed out earlier, wasn’t a particularly high one, though I’d point out it was significantly higher than the cycles during the Dalton Minimum, and 60 years after it’s onset. The 1989 event also took place just at the top of the upswing of the cycle.
Still, we don’t have enough events on record to draw any conclusions.
Thanks to this thread, I find two studies about solar storms:
– Ching-Cheh Hung, Apparent Relations Between Solar Activity And Solar Tides (…)
– James A. Marusek, Solar Storm Threat Analysis.
The lists of Great Solar Storms in both studies are very different.
Is it possible to acquire a reliable list of the largest solars storms since 1859? With this, it must be possible to investigate if the proposition of Ching-Cheh Hung is correct.
Perhaps a question to dr. Leif Svalgaard? Thanks!
“Ceres can also be seen to be causing strong uplifts in solar activity …”.
O, no!!! After the “influence” of the planets, now some asteroids too?
Please stop that astrological nonsense.
tallbloke says:
June 18, 2010 at 5:42 am
“Still, we don’t have enough events on record to draw any conclusions.”
Isn’t 150 years about 0.000000033 percent of the Sun’s 4,570,000,000 main sequence age?
Is that a large enough sample to speculate about “cyclical” solar events, beyond the idea that “it happens a lot.”
RE: anna v says: (June 18, 2010 at 4:41 am) “If some electrical engineer puts some thoughts and numbers together easy to make Faraday cages for home equipment etc could be devised. I would think aluminum foil, but do not know the power and frequencies of the pulse arriving.”
On Earth, I believe the primary problem is in the very low frequency band. As long as your main circuit breaker can handle the induced voltages, all you should have to do is pull the breaker to protect your home. I do not know, however, if it would make things better or worse for your power grid if everyone did this. I believe it should be the responsibility of your local power distributer to have an effective plan in place for notifying you of the appropriate action to take in the event of a Severe Geomagnetic Storm alert. I think the government should only be responsible for verifying that qualified plans are in place and providing general alert notifications.
tallbloke says:
June 18, 2010 at 5:42 am
The sense of meaning I took away from this, was that you were implying that if Maksamovich’s once in 200 years was ballpark, we were 3/4 of the way through that period since the Carrington event, and anyway, and Earthbound event could occur anytime.
Nobody in his right mind would say this. Events can happen at any time. It is meaningless to attach significance to “3/4 of the way”.
Still, we don’t have enough events on record to draw any conclusions.
We do have enough events to draw some conclusions, e.g. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008cosp…37.2956S
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007SpWea…507004M
“It is shown that the >4 GeV fluence of large solar energetic particle events was a factor of 10 greater and the frequency of occurrence a factor of four greater prior to 1958 than during the space era. There were two events in 1946 and 1949 with >4 GeV fluences similar to that of 23 February 1956, suggesting that the >4 GeV fluence of the largest probable event for a similar period would be ~3 times greater. The historic cosmic ray and glaciological records indicate that the fluences and probability of occurrence of such large events at both high and low energies are greatest in periods of low long-term solar activity and anticorrelated with the estimated strength of the heliospheric magnetic field. […] It is proposed that the next Gleissberg minimum of solar activity will lead to a repetition of the pre-1958 era of high-frequency, high-fluence GLE and SEP events. […]”
Although this conclusion is tentative, the chance of strong events at any time remains high.
Rik Gheysens says:
June 18, 2010 at 6:04 am
Is it possible to acquire a reliable list of the largest solars storms since 1859? With this, it must be possible to investigate if the proposition of Ching-Cheh Hung is correct.
http://www.leif.org/research/1859%20Storm%20-%20Extreme%20Space%20Weather.pdf
The statistical base of Hung’s study is too weak to be useful. And there is no physical basis for any correlation of this type. One could argue that any planetary [or other astrological – Ceres, no less] influence should have even larger effects on the smaller flares of which we have thousands, but no such effect has been demonstrated.
Have there been any super duper “events” that went off the…er…um… back side? If so, are we not good for another 200 years? Or do these things, at this strength, happen more frequently, but only towards the Earth within a 200 year period or there abouts?
Jean Meeus says:
June 18, 2010 at 6:04 am
“Ceres can also be seen to be causing strong uplifts in solar activity …”.
O, no!!! After the “influence” of the planets, now some asteroids too?
Please stop that astrological nonsense.
I agree, some of this speculation is nonsensical, verging on snake oil salesman. But surely with your great knowledge you must acknowledge that the 4 gas giants do have some influence on the orbit pattern of the Sun around the SSB?