Large sunspot Group AR1520, seen below just right of center, was pointed directly at Earth when the flare occurred.
The GOES Xray Flux spike hit X 1.4, just barely an X-class:
From Spaceweather.com
Big sunspot AR1520 unleashed an X1.4-class solar flare on July 12th at 1653 UT. Because this sunspot is directly facing Earth, everything about the blast was geoeffective. For one thing, it hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) directly toward our planet. According to a forecast track prepared by analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab, the CME will hit Earth on July 14th around 10:20 UT (+/- 7 hours) and could spark strong geomagnetic storms.
The explosion also strobed Earth with a pulse of extreme UV radiation, shown here in a movie recorded by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory:
The UV pulse partially ionized Earth’s upper atmosphere, disturbing the normal propagation of radio signals around the planet. Monitoring stations in Norway, Ireland and Italy recorded the sudden ionospheric disturbance.
Finally, solar protons accelerated by the blast are swarming around Earth. The radiation storm, in progress, ranks “S1” on NOAA space weather scales, which means it poses no serious threat to satellites or astronauts. This could change if the storm continues to intensify. Stay tuned.
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Lol, off topic, you mean no answer
Steven says:
July 15, 2012 at 11:45 am
Leif, I actually read your paper and i see energy of the system mentioned numerous times. What is this energy Leif?
Wow, amazing [and that you should say ‘actually’ suggesting that you normally do not pay attention to anything]. But which paper are you referring to? Ir is very likely that energy is mentioned in just about any physical paper.
Steven says:
July 15, 2012 at 11:52 am
E=mc^2 demands that a particle completely at rest, not moving in your magnetic field, possess charge, contrary to everything you have been saying.
Apart from this being nonsense it is also irrelevant.
Steven says:
July 15, 2012 at 11:52 am
E=mc^2 demands that a particle completely at rest, not moving in your magnetic field, possess charge
What Einstein showed [I have his 1905 paper right here in front of me] was, and I quote “If a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by L/c^2. The fact that the energy withdrawn from the body becomes energy of radiation evidently makes no difference”
No mention of that E=Mc^2 demands that the particle possesses charge, in fact it “evidently makes no difference”.
Leif,
Thank you for the link to your presentation. Impressive amount of details on the methods of observation of sun spots over the centuries, and how this may have affected total solar irradiance over that period. You make a compelling argument which seem to suggest that TSI has varied even less over the past 3 centuries than the Wang et al 2005 analysis suggests, which was already less than the Lean et al 2000 assessment.
If your assessment is correct, then there is very little the sun has contributed to any climate change since at least the Little Ice Age.
Still, do you have any other independent assessment of TSI which confirms (of contradicts) your estimates ?
How about beryllium isotope analysis ? Does that method provide enough statistical significant accuracy in this debate about past solar irradiance, or is there too much noise in that signal to differentiate between, say, Lean et al 2000 and your assessment of TSI over the centuries ?
Rob Dekker says:
July 16, 2012 at 1:51 am
How about beryllium isotope analysis ?
http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009GL038004-Berggren.pdf :
“Recent 10Be values are low; however, they do not indicate unusually high recent solar activity compared to the last 600 years”
http://www.leif.org/EOS/2011GL046658.pdf :
“Therefore, the best estimate of magnetic activity, and presumably TSI, for the least‐active Maunder Minimum phases appears to be provided by direct measurement in 2008–2009. … suggests that drivers other than TSI dominate Earth’s long‐term climate change”
A problem with the isotope analysis is that many factors determine what we see, not only solar activity but also climate and changes in the Earth’s magnetic field.
This is an active research area right now. I’m leading two workshops on that:
http://www.leif.org/research/Svalgaard_ISSI_Proposal_Base.pdf
http://ssnworkshop.wikia.com/wiki/Home