Solar Storm (Carrington Event)

I was reading in the current Farmer's Almanac (2019), pages 158 to 161, that there have been numerous carrington events since the one in the 1800's:

7:04 a.m. on May 13, 1921. All of the signal and switching mechanisms of the New York Central Railroad were knocked out of operation. A fire raged in the control tower at the New York City's 57th Street and Park Avenue, while flames in the Central New England Railroad station destroyed that entire building. Telegraph operations throughout the country came to a standstill due to damaged equipment and blown fuses.

2:44 a.m. on March 13, 1989, sun induced surges began wreaking havoc on Quebec's electrical power grid, within a minute, the province and its 6 million people were in darkness. Meanwhile, as U.S. electric grids experienced shutdowns and voltage swings at major substations, the country managed barely to avoid cascading blackouts.

From October 19 through November 7, 2003, it was a solar burp compared with the Carrington event, the NOAA reported the second fastest known journey of solar material to Earth, it arrived in half the normal 2 to 4 days travel time. The storm's effects ranged from a blackout in northern Europe to rerouted airlines to avoid high radiation levels. It damaged spacecraft, notably, the loss of the $640 million ADEOS-II satellite, which was on a mission to study climate change.

In May 2008, a team of space weather experts estimated that a low frequency/high consequence event would produce damage of $1 trillion to $2 trillion during the first year and that recovery would take 4 to 10 years.

Some serious stuff.

I have been looking into the possibility of a warning system for solar storms.

These pages give info on current activity:
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/space-weather-overview
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/alerts-watches-and-warnings

And this one is a more detailed view:
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/electric-power-community-dashboard

But turning them into a meaningful warning system is a whole different ball game. I used to study all this stuff, but am a little out of practice. I think there is enough information that a warning system could be developed, but it would have a short lead time and wouldn't be very reliable.

I try to visit http://spaceweather.com regularly, and have subscribed to their email list. That way I get email notices of any unusual space weather events and can read the full site to see if I need to take any mitigation steps prior to a solar storm arrival. Unless it was a particularly fast moving solar storm I can afford to sleep for 8-10 hours and still have time to put my mitigation plan into action.

dmwalsh568 wrote:I try to visit http://spaceweather.com regularly, and have subscribed to their email list. That way I get email notices of any unusual space weather events and can read the full site to see if I need to take any mitigation steps prior to a solar storm arrival. Unless it was a particularly fast moving solar storm I can afford to sleep for 8-10 hours and still have time to put my mitigation plan into action.

I used to check that site every couple of days. Didn't know they had a mailing list. About the time APN (and another forum) crashed, I also lost both my primary and backup computers (and I moved), so I have been rebuilding my bookmarks and my knowledge base.
(I had most stuff backed up, but some things were not up to date by the time I got reestablished and I have been restoring things one by one.)

I visit solamham.com every few days it kinda gives me a heads up with the sun spots

I came across this article in the old farmers almanac, 7 solar storms that affected earth, interesting:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-12/how-solar-storms-affect-earth/5740454

Four of those seven happened in 1989?

They missed the one in 1921.
https://www.offthegridnews.com/grid-threats/the-1921-event-that-could-kill-280-million-americans-today/

Wonder how many others they missed.

A faint halo CME coming, you can subscribe to spaceweather.com for notifications and updates:


http://spaceweather.com/

rick1 wrote:A faint halo CME coming, you can subscribe to spaceweather.com for notifications and updates:
http://spaceweather.com/

Looks like the actual jet of particles will miss us,
but the X-Ray burst interfered with Short Wave
radio traffic all over Asia and surrounding areas.

Just in case you want to distract yourself from all the pandemic and economic news....

Interesting historical note on Spaceweather.com today:

A WARNING FROM HISTORY--THE CARRINGTON EVENT WAS NOT UNIQUE: On Sept. 1st, 1859, the most ferocious solar storm in recorded history engulfed our planet. It was "the Carrington Event," named after British scientist Richard Carrington, who witnessed the flare that started it. The storm rocked Earth's magnetic field, sparked auroras over Cuba, the Bahamas and Hawaii, set fire to telegraph stations, and wrote itself into history books as the Biggest. Solar. Storm. Ever.

But, sometimes, what you read in history books is wrong.

"The Carrington Event was not unique," says Hisashi Hayakawa of Japan's Nagoya University, whose recent study of solar storms has uncovered other events of comparable intensity. "While the Carrington Event has long been considered a once-in-a-century catastrophe, historical observations warn us that this may be something that occurs much more frequently."

snip

A good example is the great storm of mid-September 1770, when extremely bright red auroras blanketed Japan and parts of China. Captain Cook himself saw the display from near Timor Island, south of Indonesia. Hayakawa and colleagues recently found drawings of the instigating sunspot, and it is twice the size of the Carrington sunspot group. Paintings, dairy entries, and other newfound records, especially from China, depict some of the lowest-latitude auroras ever, spread over a period of 9 days.

An eyewitness sketch of red auroras over Japan in mid-September 1770. [Ref]

"We conclude that the 1770 magnetic storm was comparable to the Carrington Event, at least in terms of auroral visibility," wrote Hayakawa and colleagues in a 2017 Astrophysical Journal Letter. Moreover, "the duration of the storm activity was much longer than usual."

Spaceweather.com has an update on the possibilities for a "perfect CME"

https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2021/01/21/what-if-a-perfect-cme-hit-earth/

spaceweather.com wrote:WHAT IF A 'PERFECT CME' HIT EARTH? You've heard of a "perfect storm." But what about a perfect solar storm? A new study just published in the research journal Space Weather considers what might happen if a worst-case coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth. Spoiler alert: You might need a backup generator.

For years, researchers have been wondering, what's the worst the sun could do? In 2014, Bruce Tsurutani (JPL) and Gurbax Lakhina (Indian Institute of Geomagnetism) introduced the "Perfect CME." It would be fast, leaving the sun around 3,000 km/s, and aimed directly at Earth. Moreover, it would follow another CME, which would clear the path in front of it, allowing the storm cloud to hit Earth with maximum force.

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Using relatively simple calculations, Tsurutani and Lakhina showed that a Perfect CME would reach Earth in only 12 hours, allowing emergency managers little time to prepare, and slam into our magnetosphere at 45 times the local speed of sound. In response to such a shock, there would be a geomagnetic storm perhaps twice as strong as the Carrington Event of 1859. Power grids, GPS and other high-tech services could experience significant outages.

Sounds bad? Turns out it could be worse.

snip

"We used a coupled magnetohydrodynamic(MHD)-ring current-ionosphere computer model," says Welling. "MHD results contain far more complexity and better reflect the real-world system."

The team found that geomagnetic disturbances in response to a Perfect CME could be 10 times stronger than Tsurutani and Lakhina calculated, especially at latitudes above 45 to 50 degrees. "[Our results] exceed values observed during many past extreme events, including the March 1989 storm that brought down the Hydro-Quebec power grid in eastern Canada; the May 1921 railroad storm; and the Carrington Event itself," says Welling.

A key result of the new study is how the CME would distort and compress Earth's magnetosphere. The strike would push the magnetopause down until it is only 2 Earth-radii above our planet's surface. Satellites in Earth orbit would suddenly find themselves exposed to a hail of energetic charged particles, potentially short-circuiting sensitive electronics. A "superfountain" of oxygen ions rising up from the top of Earth's atmosphere might literally drag satellites down, hastening their demise.

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Now for the good news: Perfect CMEs are rare.

Angelos Vourlidas of Johns Hopkins University has studied the statistics of CMEs. He notes that SOHO has captured only two CMEs with velocities greater than 3,000 km/s since the start of operations in 1996. “This means we expect roughly one CME ejected at speeds above 3000 km/s per solar cycle,” he says.  Speed isn’t the only factor, however. To be “perfect,” a 3000 km/s CME would need to follow another CME, clearing its path, and both CMEs must be aimed directly at Earth.

So while they are rare events, we would have at most 12 hours notice if a perfect CME was heading our way to button up our electronics and finish any last minute preps. Yet another reason to keep prepping and subscribing to some solar alerts....