A paper recently published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics finds that “a solar proton event, if it took place in the near future with an intensity similar to that ascribed to the Carrington Event of 1859”. Based on the results of the study it would be expected to have a major impact on atmospheric composition throughout the middle atmosphere, resulting in significant and persistent decrease in total ozone, resulting in a “significant [global] cooling of more than 3C”.
From the paper: Solar energetic particle events, frequently referred to solar proton events (SPEs), occur when protons and other particles emitted by the active Sun are accelerated to very high energies (for protons up to 500 MeV) either close to the
Sun’s surface during a solar flare or in interplanetary space by magnetic shock waves associated with coronal mass ejections (Reames, 1999). They typically last for a few days. The high energy protons are deflected, when they enter the Earth’s magnetic field, and upon penetrating the atmosphere can cause massive ionization including significant production of HOx and NOx (Sepp¨al¨a et al., 2004; Jackman et al., 2009).
Based on the modeling done here, and while the Carrington Event of 1859 lasted only 2 days, the proton event caused persistent changes in atmospheric ozone lasting up to several months, the authors predict such an event could cause a “cooling of up to 5 K in eastern Europe and Russia to a somewhat smaller decrease of about 3 K for the Southern Hemisphere in Argentina.” as shown in figure 9 below:
Influence of a Carrington-like event on the atmospheric chemistry, temperature and dynamics
M. Calisto, P. T. Verronen, E. Rozanov, and T. Peter
Abstract:
We have modeled the atmospheric impact of a major solar energetic particle event similar in intensity to what is thought of the Carrington Event of 1–2 September 1859. Ionization rates for the August 1972 solar proton event, which had an energy spectrum comparable to the Carrington Event, were scaled up in proportion to the fluence estimated for both events. We have assumed such an event to take place in the year 2020 in order to investigate the impact on the modern, near future atmosphere. Effects on atmospheric chemistry, temperature and dynamics were investigated using the 3-D Chemistry Climate Model SOCOL v2.0. We find significant responses of NOx, HOx, ozone, temperature and zonal wind. Ozone and NOx have in common an unusually strong and long-lived response to this solar proton event.
The model suggests a 3-fold increase of NOx generated in the upper stratosphere lasting until the end of November, and an up to 10-fold increase in upper mesospheric HOx. Due to the NOx and HOx enhancements, ozone reduces by up to 60–80% in the mesosphere during the days after the event, and by up to 20–40% in the middle stratosphere lasting for several months after the event. Total ozone is reduced by up to 20 DU in the Northern Hemisphere and up to 10 DU in the Southern Hemisphere.
Free tropospheric and surface air temperatures show a significant cooling of more than 3 K and zonal winds change significantly by 3–5 m s−1 in the UTLS region. In conclusion, a solar proton event, if it took place in the near future with an intensity similar to that ascribed to of the Carrington Event of 1859, must be expected to have a major impact on atmospheric composition throughout the middle atmosphere, resulting in significant and persistent decrease in total ozone.
…
From the concluding remarks:
Comparing the outcome for temperature and dynamics modeled with SOCOL with results of Jackman et al. (2007), who investigated the SPE of October/November 2003 using
their 3-D TIME-GCM, we see that these results are in good qualitative agreement. They show that shortly after the event happened, the southern hemispheric polar region has a decrease in temperature throughout the entire mesosphere, similar to our results for the northern hemispheric polar region.
The difference between their results and ours is in the intensity of the changes. For the temperature a decrease of more than 3K is shown in this work while Jackman et al. (2007)
depict a decrease of up to 2 K. The fact that our results show a larger effect can be due to the intensity of the solar proton event. The Carrington-like event presented in this paper
represents an event that is more intense than the SPE of October/ November 2003.
The qualitative agreement of our results, modeled with the 3-D CCM SOCOL, for the changes in NOx, ozone, temperature and dynamics, with those obtained by Thomas et
al. (2007) and Jackman et al. (2007), corroborates the finding that solar proton events of this strength have intense atmospheric interactions in a broad altitude range starting from
80 km down to 30 km, with repercussions for surface air temperature.
The latter range from a cooling of up to 5K in eastern Europe and Russia to a somewhat smaller decrease of about 3K for the Southern Hemisphere in Argentina. Therefore
it is important to analyze the impact of energetic particles with a 3-D CCM to ensure that the dynamical and transport aspects are properly taken into account. In this paper,
the solar proton event was placed during equinox. We think that the impact could even be larger if it would happen during earlier winter because the polar vortex prevents the exchange of fresh air from the mid-latitudes with the polar region.
Final Revised Paper (PDF, 1740 KB) Discussion Paper (ACPD)
H/t to The Hockey Schtick
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What the study does not consider is the inability to document the impact. Such an event would have major implications on electricity transfer and the technology that feeds on it. Particularly on developing countries.
Just sayin, your Directv , and subsequent NFL Sunday Ticket would be toast too. Unacceptable, but probably inevitable…..
Does the NFL get replacement satellites with the replacement ref’s package?
From boballab on September 26, 2012 at 9:06 pm:
You’re making a good case for having an underground bunker with the ceiling no less than 12-15 feet from the surface, so you’re in the range where it stays around the low 50’s°F year round. Put on the thermal underwear, pile on the blankets, and tough out the winter. In the cities, large buildings may have basements that deep. Be prepared to defend your territory, and make sure the entryways are such that you can get in and out even with deep snow and built-up ice.
Plus underground bunkers are useful for other things. They’re cool enough for food storage, as basically they’re root cellars. And they’re handy to have in case of a zombie apocalypse.
For a temperature chart, try this:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
So, it’s back to ozone yet again … cue Henry P 🙂
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/en/research/chemie/tpeter/totozon.html … Fig 1 [invert].
http://www.giub.unibe.ch/klimet/docs/climdyn_2004_broennimannetal.pdf … Fig 1.
http://www.leif.org/EOS/Nature/nature04746-Ozone-Recovery-Signe.pdf
Compare …
http://www.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/tls/medium/global/ch_tls_2011_03_anom_v03_3.png
http://www.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/tls/medium/global/ch_tls_2012_03_anom_v03_3.png
… with
http://www.theozonehole.com/images/larctic7.jpg
http://www.theozonehole.com/images/arcticdev372012.jpg
Not forgetting both sides now …
http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ProtonOzone
PaulID: “the way I understand a carrington event only those electronic things that are turned on at the time of impact will be wiped …”
Sorta. There’s off and then there’s off. By and large, anything with a mechanical power switch close to the electronics will be fine. But a very large number of electronic devices are ‘on’ when they’re ‘off’. This is true for most kitchen electronics (microwave, etc.) as well as most entertainment devices. Even then, anything with a ‘soft off’ still has to deal with any antenna effect from an attached power cord whether the cord is plugged in or not.
These skeptics, these shoemakers go running right to the data and discover there was no cooling in 1859, ruining a perfectly good computer game. 3d even!
Did we say how long it lasted? Maybe it was just a week and everyone wrote it off as “weather”.
FWIW, Andrew Lacis got similar cooling the first year when he pulled the non-condensing greenhouse gasses out of his computer game a couple years back.
I don’t think that one was 3d.
Carrying ton events are pure chance. You can’t tax that, apart from at the betting shop.
Henry says:
This is utter and complete rubbish:
“resulting in significant and persistent decrease in total ozone, resulting in a “significant [global] cooling of more than 3C”.”
An increase in ozone causes cooling – as we have just discovered from my applicable correlations (ozone going up from 1996, globally, both NH and SH, and maxima falling globally, from 1995)
A sudden massive decrease in ozone would cause more warming – as less high energy photons will be back radiated to space.
Given that HADsst2 shows a warming over the 1859-69 decade, perhaps more than anything, this study indicates how much ozone has been used incorrectly as a negative forcing in the models to help counteract the overestimation of the positive forcing of co2.
Good job fellas.
There wasn’t cooling around the 1859 event because very few volcanoes were active. Stratosphere volcanoes were quiet.
I don’t agree with Eschenbach and his conclusions.
We were toasty and dry up through 2007 in NA. Then poom, Chaiten in May 2008. Then the other big honkers soon followed, oceans cooled and we all got cooler and wetter. Okmok , Kasatochi, Sarychev Peak, Redoubt and Bizmianny hitting the stratosphere.
Eschenbach says volcanic activity doesn’t do anything! Lol
tallbloke says:
September 26, 2012 at 11:09 pm
Given that HADsst2 shows a warming over the 1859-69 decade, perhaps more than anything, this study indicates how much ozone has been used incorrectly as a negative forcing in the models to help counteract the overestimation of the positive forcing of co2.
Pretty much everything is used in the climate models has an incorrectly high negative forcing or an incorrectly low positive forcing.
Gotta maintain that high CO2 forcing at all costs. Otherwise the gravy train gets derailed.
IF…a solar proton event, took place in the near future with an intensity similar to that ascribed to the Carrington Event of 1859…….well, that’s a big IF. Since ice cores suggest CE’s occur about every 500 years or so and the last one happened in 1859 I guess I shall not worry too much.
Katla did blow in 1860 gaining it a VEI-4 assignment. Other than for that activity, everything else was extremely low. If this is accurate.
http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/find_eruptions.cfm
Since there’ll be a day’s warning, or more, warning, unplug them.
For protection angst unpredictable power surges, I recommend using hefty Uninterruptible Power Supplies. These use standard lawm mower batteries, which can be replaced at a local budget battery store.
Based on a model? Interesting, but has about as much credence as other model based predictions, all of which are wrong when compared to the present.
Another paper, that simply shows that models are wrong.
No reduction of this magnitude & duration exists in the Central England Temperature record for any period, let alone for 1859+.
Thermometers may not have been as accurate as today, but a 3C difference isn’t going to get lost in “noise”.
A solar proton event came at us
but there was nothing we could do
We’d spent all our money
to reduce CO2.
RACookPE1978 says:
Turn the internet “on” for a dot, “off” for a “dash” ….. Heck, it’s binary.
Head in hands …argghhhh! Don’t they teach anything now?
dot is a short term change to a state. A dash is the long change to the same state
What you are suggesting is a binary state transmission code but to know when to read the code, you also need a clock. We could of course use that big bright thing in the sky as a clock, so that the internet state could be taken at sunrise/sunset, but then it wouldn’t work worldwide because we all have different sunset/sunrise.
We could agree an internationally agreed “time to read the internet”, however as such things are highly political, we would need several “dot-dash” conferences. So, far it has taken three climate conferences since CLimategate/jokenhagen … and they still haven’t agreed a replacement for Kyoto that runs out on the 31st December.
But of course, we would need this communication system in place in order to organise the conference and then how would all those 1000s of delegates find their way their without GPS and telephones.
In other words …. we are doomed.
I am intrigued by the apparent acceptance that the solar effects involved in a Carrington event would reduce ozone higher up and thus cool the upper atmosphere.
The result would be a cooler mesosphere and stratosphere and a rising tropopause especially towards the poles allowing a poleward shift in the climate zones and more energy into the oceans to warm rather than cool the troposphere just as I have proposed previously.
Thanks to tallbloke for pointing out that according to HADsst2 there was warming after the Carrington event.
Also thanks to HenryP who shares my view that the models have the sign of the system response wrong as regards the effect of ozone changes.
The actual observed system response may be opposite to that used within their model and Joanna Haigh recently pointed out there is some evidence that the response to solar changes above 45km is the opposite of that previously thought.
The question then is whether solar variability on a 500 year timescale such as from MWP to LIA and LIA to date is also capable of reducing upper atmosphere ozone in the way observed during the late 20th century.
We do know that the mesosphere cooled along with the stratosphere at that time and my proposition has been that the cooling response higher up outweighed any warming response lower down to produce a solar induced cooling of both stratosphere and mesosphere when the sun was more active.
The observed climate changes on the surface would all be a consequance of the resultant shifts in the climate zones, jet stream behaviour and cloudiness / albedo variations causing a change in the amount of solar energy getting into the oceans to drive the climate system.
We also know that the cooling of the stratosphere stopped in the late 90s as solar activity declined from the peak of cycle 23 and that slight warming of the stratosphere may now be in progress coinciding with low cycle 24.
Simultaneously we see more meridional jets, a cessation of tropospheric warming (possibly slight cooling), and a stall in the increase in ocean heat content.
A lot of stuff comes together if one proposes a solar effect on ozone differentially at different heights plus a reversal of the usually assumed ozone response to solar variations.
Cat: http://postimage.org/image/4adfejjij/full
Pigeons: http://postimage.org/image/jx4orwxaj/full
more taxpayer money wasted:
27 Sept: Tampa Bay Times: AP: Gore to visit Nova’s coral reef research center
HOLLYWOOD, Fla. (AP) — Former Vice President Al Gore is slated to speak at the opening of Nova Southeastern University’s $50 million coral reef research center…
Nova received a $15 million dollar federal stimulus grant to help fund the center. University officials said the center has created 22 new academic jobs, 300 construction jobs and will employ 50 graduate students.
Researchers will also study the effects of climate change on reefs and examine their ability to recover from damage.
U.S. Congresswoman and Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz will also attend Thursday’s event.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/F/FL_GORE_CORAL_REEF_RESEARCH_FLOL-?SITE=FLPET&SECTION=HOME
Looks like that Carrington Event led to 20 years of warming:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/
and whilst we are about it one can see the pronounced effect of quieter solar cycle 20.
Cars electronics should still work. The steel bodies will act as a Faraday cage, works with lightning so it should work against the odd proton. Put your computer etc. in a metal box.
Interesting post.
@Steve Oregon says:
September 26, 2012 at 8:19 pm
“Some of the younger alarmists will have participated in every chapter.
Will they claim they were going with the best science every time?
So they are always right when they are always wrong ???”
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Yeah, it’s easy to pick the winning horse in yesterday’s race based on the best available information at the time.
I had a quick look at the CET temperatures for the time
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-D.htm (pannel3)
Nothing exceptional there either in the autumn 1859 or winter 1860 temperatures, that was not present in the previous or the subsequent decade.
Daily CET following Carrington Event of September 1859 is shown here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CarringtonEvent.htm
(compared to 1858 and 1860)