Blogging from my phone
Check WUWT Solar Reference Page
Updated: It was an X1.7 class eruption, it does not appear to be headed towards Earth. JTF
Blogging from my phone
Check WUWT Solar Reference Page
Updated: It was an X1.7 class eruption, it does not appear to be headed towards Earth. JTF
SOLAR FLARE ALERT:
A major solar flare reaching X1.7 took place at 18:37 UTC Friday afternoon.
http://solarham.com/
http://solarham.com/top10.txt
Fortunately, it’s not heading our way. http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?day=27&month=01&year=2012&view=view
Not aimed at Earth. But it’s a pretty big one.
Any body see massive increases in cloud cover and drops in temperature due to all those solar ions hitting the atmosphere?
Another Carrington Event and we won’t have to worry about global warming for a while, or blogging.
“The solar flare was rated an X1.7-class eruption, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). X-class flares are the most powerful type of solar storm, with M-class storms falling within the mid-range, and C-class flares being the weakest.
Several spacecraft, including NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Solar Heliospheric Observatory, observed the solar eruption, which occurred at 1:37 p.m. EST (1837 GMT). The flare unleashed a wave of charged particles, called a coronal mass ejection, but space weather experts said it was not aimed at Earth.”
http://www.space.com/14387-biggest-solar-flare-2012-radiation-storm.html
“fortunately it was not aimed towards Earth. JTF”
It is unfortunate if you are a Ham operator. They like the ionosphere to get all agitated. Also for those who like to see the aurora borealis, and austrealis.
LazyTeenager says: January 27, 2012 at 3:36 pm
[Any body see massive increases in cloud cover and drops in temperature due to all those solar ions hitting the atmosphere?]
Yes.
Godlike Productions has a good thread on this:
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1767189/pg1
Jim Cripwell says: January 27, 2012 at 4:00 pm
It is unfortunate if you are a Ham operator. They like the ionosphere to get all agitated. Also for those who like to see the aurora borealis, and austrealis
Good point, I changed it to read, “it does not appear to be aimed towards Earth.” Also, from the Godlike Productions post I linked to above, “Looks like it is from 1402 which has been rotating out of view earth bound CME is not likely, but we are currently experiencing a huge radio absorption over North America I’d hate to be flying right now.”
Luck of the draw, missed a big one.
Wow, the sun appears very active right now:
http://www.solen.info/solar/images/charmap.jpg
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sxi/goes15/latest.html
Here’s video of the eruption:
LazyTeenager says:
January 27, 2012 at 3:36 pm
Any body see massive increases in cloud cover and drops in temperature due to all those solar ions hitting the atmosphere?
The electroscavenging hypothesis predicts exactly the opposite.
Sorry .. breaking alert JTF
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/01/120126-solar-storm-cold-plasma-earth-space-science/?source=link_fb0120127news-coldplasma
Giant Veil of “Cold Plasma” Discovered High Above Earth
Clouds of charged particles stretch a quarter the way to the moon, experts say..
Dave Mosher
for National Geographic News
Published January 26, 2012
Clouds of “cold plasma” reach from the top of Earth’s atmosphere to at least a quarter the distance to the moon, according to new data from a cluster of European satellites.
Earth generates cold plasma—slow-moving charged particles—at the edge of space, where sunlight strips electrons from gas atoms, leaving only their positively charged cores, or nuclei.
(Find out how cold plasma might also help explain why Mars is missing its atmosphere.)
Researchers had suspected these hard-to-detect particles might influence incoming space weather, such as this week’s solar flare and resulting geomagnetic storm. That’s because solar storms barrage Earth with similar but high-speed charged particles.
Still, no one could be certain what the effects of cold plasma might be without a handle on its true abundance around our planet.
“It’s like the weather forecast on TV. It’s very complicated to make a reasonable forecast without the basic variables,” said space scientist Mats André, of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics.
“Discovering this cold plasma is like saying, Oh gosh, there are oceans here that affect our weather,” he said.
oops that article does continue…
The Trick to Finding Cold Plasma
Researchers already knew that some cold plasma existed in the ionosphere, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. But few researchers had looked for the clouds between 12,400 and 60,000 miles (20,000 and 100,000 kilometers) high.
(Also see “Pictures: Giant Walls of Plasma Seen on Sun.”)
André and his colleague Chris Cully suspected the plasma could be out there, but they knew the positive charge of spacecraft wasn’t helping any search efforts.
Similar to the way cold plasma is created, sunlight strips electrons from spacecraft materials, making their hulls positively charged. Like two matching magnetic poles, a spacecraft would simply repulse any cold plasma around it.
To find the stuff, André and Cully instead analyzed anomalies in data from the European Space Agency’s Cluster II spacecraft.
This group of four satellites swings around Earth in a highly elliptical orbit. At the orbit’s peak, the probes reach nearly halfway to the moon.
The enormous distance gives researchers a chance to sweep through and monitor Earth’s magnetic field and electrical activity, including the influence of “hot” charged particles emitted by the sun.
Anomalies in the Cluster II data turned out to be shockwaves from cold plasma particles moving around the satellites.
Cold Plasma a Space Weather “Elephant”
In the end, the pair found that cold plasma makes up between 50 and 70 percent of all charged particles within the farther reaches of Earth’s magnetic field.
(Related: “Mini Magnetic Shield Found on the Moon.”)
André says it’s now time to start updating space-weather models to take the extra cold plasma into account—at this point, for instance, nothing is known about how the plasma might affect solar storms.
This influence is “not a minor thing in space weather,” André said. “It’s an elephant in the room.”
the cold-plasma study has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/01/120126-solar-storm-cold-plasma-earth-space-science/?source=link_fb0120127news-coldplasma
Doubtful it’s “aimed” anywhere.
Carla says: January 27, 2012 at 5:46 pm
Giant Veil of “Cold Plasma” Discovered High Above Earth Clouds of charged particles stretch a quarter the way to the moon, experts say..
Interesting. I will post it. Per a January 7, 2009 linked within the article. “”Warm Plasma Cloak” Discovered Enveloping Earth”,
“The magnetosphere—the shield of ions and electrons that envelops Earth—extends far beyond the atmosphere, defending the planet from the harmful solar wind.
Charles “Rick” Chappell, a physicist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, led a research team that assembled information dating back decades to describe the new magnetosphere layer.
Some of the first hints of the cloak first showed up in data from research satellites in the early 1970s. The cloak was finally confirmed by NASA’s Polar satellite, which ended a 12-year run in April 2008.
The cloak’s discovery creates a theoretical home for particles that didn’t fit with any of the other understood parts of the Earth’s magnetosphere, Chappell said.”
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/01/090107-warm-plasma-cloak.html
Just a matter of time, No?
I will give this a shot with the link also 🙂
Link
Carla, published, thx JTF
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/27/giant-veil-of-cold-plasma-discovered-high-above-earth/
Dave Worley says: January 27, 2012 at 6:12 pm
Doubtful it’s “aimed” anywhere.
Yes, you are right. I changed it read, “it does not appear to be headed towards Earth”.
Thank you. JTF
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-16754531
“A man in Dorset has been left mystified after tiny blue spheres fell from the sky into his garden.
Steve Hornsby from Bournemouth said the 3cm diameter balls came raining down late on Thursday afternoon during a hail storm.”
I’m sure this is nothing to do with the sun…
Even ol’ sol is getting worked up about the Florida primary?
One of those directly at earth could cause some major problems. You could be stuck in the air in an airplane because communication between air and ground are scrambled.
Another video of it:
@ Jimmy Haigh.
Looks like some sort of marine egg.
LazyTeenager says:
January 27, 2012 at 3:36 pm
Any body see massive increases in cloud cover and drops in temperature due to all those solar ions hitting the atmosphere?
Actually you’ve got Svensmark ass-backwards. High solar emission is hypothesised to blow away cosmic rays from the earth, reducing could ion nucleation, reducing cloud and increasing insolation and thus temperature. By contrast, it is a drop in solar output that lets the cosmic rays in and thus increased cloud, shading the earth surface from insolation and thus causing cooling.
>to blow away cosmic rays from the earth, reducing could ion nucleation
Great point!
In fact those silly CAGW people often try to claim that sun could not be driving warming for the last 30 years up to 1998 since the sun’s activity been going the other way!
Talk about real foot in mouth here! The claim of this theory is in fact less sun activity = more warming. So in a really funny twist of humor those CAGW people are supporting this theory by claiming the sun been going in the wrong direction to explain the warming!
I have not seen the data that shows suns output was dropping up to 1998 over the previous 30 years, but if this is in fact the case, then this idea certainly needs more study.
Here is a short video that explains this inverse effect.
In the above, they used layers of sea sediments (diatoms) and even tree ring studies. They easily found this inverse relationship to the sun as has many other researchers and papers have.
Of course you cannot tax the sun, so such studies don’t receive much funding. So anything not blaming CO2 does not receive any real money these days.