If your GPS system’s performance is a little spotty on Friday, don’t call tech support. Blame the sun. Three waves of charged particles that erupted from its corona Sunday, Monday and Tuesday will hit the Earth in the next few days in what scientists are calling the biggest solar event since December 2006.
It won’t be as bad as a 2003 flare-up that is the biggest solar eruption ever recorded by instruments, but planes are being directed further south than usual to avoid the North Pole, where the impact will be most severe. Northern areas may also be treated to a light show Thursday and Friday nights.
Sunny, with a Chance of Coronal Mass
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration reported Thursday on its daily space weather site that solar activity Thursday would be moderate, but over the next three days there could be “an increase to unsettled to active conditions, with a chance for minor storm periods expected late on day one into day two (18 February) because of the arrival of the coronal mass eruption.” The forecast for day three, Feb. 19, is “quiet to active.”
The warning of G1 or G2, out of a range through G5, is mild, said Joseph B. Gurman, project scientist for NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory. However, it could impact some radio frequencies, he said.
“Flares have excess high energy radiation — EUV, soft and hard X-ray, even gamma rays — that can affect ionization and heating in the Earth outermost atmosphere, the thermosphere,” Gurman told us. “That, in turn, affects the heights at which shortwave radio frequency signals are reflected, and sometimes that means disrupting RF communications, particularly near the geomagnetic poles.”
Some disruptions were reported in China. Unlike the coronal mass that takes hours to travel the 95 million miles to Earth, electromagnetic radiation gets… Read more
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