They have been fantastic this past week!! Just going off like crazy up in Anchorage, AK. Here are some pics I grabbed from Sunday night at around 01:00
WAKE UP THIS IS THE AURORA ALARM also: nice pics :). BREAKING (1 hr edit): THE AURORAL ALARM HAS BEEN CANCELLED
So uh. Typically, large coronal mass ejections are produced by clusters of big, magnetically complex sunspots. Over the next few days, those badbois (2993, 2994, and 2995) are gonna rotate into geoeffective position, from the left side of the earth-facing solar surface into the center-right area. Unintuitively, we would call this "from East to West", because the prevailing convention is to affix East to Earth's duskward direction, and West to dawnwards. At least geometric/astronomical North and South are consistent between the Earth and sun. But, of course, the Earth's North pole is actually a magnetic South pole, by convention (field lines go "into" the Earth's "North" pole and "out of" Earth's "South" pole). And to think, if we woulda just decided electrons were mathematically positive and protons negative, North would be North. At least for now, until the poles reverse again in another hundred thousand years or so. Also worth noting that so far solar cycle #25 is very much outperforming expectations: BTW, I think we should formalize a better method than counting sunspots for quantifying solar activity (total solar irradiance might be part of it), but of course also keep sunspot number, since comparisons with the historical record are so valuable. Hopefully this is the last comment I make here.
It's not terribly unusual to see clusters like this in the +/- ~3 years surrounding solar maximum. And yes, the progression of sunspot latitude over the solar cycle progresses from higher latitudes to nearer the equator And another yes; Sunspots are generally more geoeffective the closer they are to the equator. But mostly, it's a matter of luck. 1) Whether a Carrington-level event is produced at all, and 2) Whether it is Earth directed. As for assigning a probability to the likelihood of another Carrington CME hitting Earth, it seems like a fool's errand, with one datapoint over 150 years. We don't even know what the actual plasma conditions were out there, just the Earth's response at the time, and only a vague picture of that, to boot. I'd be surprised if there wasn't an order of magnitude difference between different estimates, so I guess I find some comfort in the uncertainty. Let's pray for the 1% estimate. Of course, it's only a matter of time. Hopefully the sun holds off until this era of social turmoil resolves itself.
4/20 was yesterday, but you're still high edit: nihilism plays way better in person, srry
Interesting. Pete Riley suggested a 12% chance of Carrington class event between 2012 and 2022 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2011SW000734 Whereas another group says around 1% between 2019 and 2029 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-38918-8 I'm going to take the average and say 6%. TIL that near solar maxima, the Sun produces about three CMEs every day, whereas near solar minima, there is about one CME every five days.
When I moved back to the US from Budapest, the last leg was Heathrow to SeaTac via the Great Circle route at night ... and the aurora was visible at eye level outside the aircraft for almost the entire flight. People were all asleep, and I was standing looking out the portal on the door, watching the aurora for hours. It's the only time I have seen it.
You should take mk's Geiger counter, especially if you're going to Europe and flying through/near the auroral zone. Best of luck w/ TSA :(. I think it says "nuclear radiation" somewhere on the device, sooooooo
Yeah, it's almost always safe to assume forecasts for space weather are in UT. I'm still going to try to take my counter on my next trans-Atlantic flight, you shouldn't need a storm to see a significantly elevated radiation level at higher altitudes.
I'm starting to reconsider my choice to do international travel after reading about getting back into the US. You need an antigen test within a day of travel that needs to be administered in some official capacity so that there's documentation. I actually had covid with in the last 90 days, so I should be fine, except that I knew I had covid so I quarantined like a responsible person, whereas if I would have gone to a doctor to get a medical record, then I'd have a "recovery passport". But I can't do that now, because a positive test is only good as a positive test for like a month or something. So moronic. Have we not learned anything in 2 years?
Most airports have these now. I spent $20 in Milan for a q-tip up the nose. (but I just checked SFO for an upcoming trip will be $75 - so plan accordingly)You need an antigen test within a day of travel that needs to be administered in some official capacity
Shoulda been a dope aurora like 32 hours ago for Merlin and other Alaska peeps. Looks like it was a pretty solid geomagnetic storm. If there is ever a Carrington-tier event in the forecast, I will post incessantly about it, with a vulgarity and urgency exceeding anyting (ANYting) anyone on here has ever seen from me before. And I've set that bar pretty high. This is not that moment :).
Yeah this looks like a reasonable forecast. Of course, we just had a good sized geomagnetic storm two or three days ago that was totally unpredicted, sometimes the magnetic field in the upstream (of Earth) solar wind does whatever the hell it wants to. Starlink should be fine unless they get caught in their lower-orbit commissioning phase again. This should be a minor to moderate geomagnetic storm, at most. We'll know when we get an "uh oh..." coronal mass ejection headed right for us, this ain't it.
I was talking to my uncle about this just today. Of really bad scenarios that are out of our control, this one doesn't seem particularly remote. A present-day Carrington Event could be the complete undoing of civilization."uh oh..." coronal mass ejection headed right for us, this ain't it.
The community has characterized spaceweather and the solar events that produce it pretty thoroughly, at this point. Like you say, we can't do anything, defensively, the only thing we could do would be to warn the world what was about to happen. I dunno if it would be the complete undoing of civilization, especially if we got our messaging right (uh oh, we're notoriously bad here), but it'd certainly be a setback to lose a bunch of satellites in low earth orbit. It's probably mostly military satellites in LEO. Almost all of the commercial comms satellites are up much further in geostationary orbit, but they could still see some impacts. Not enough folks with the knowhow out there to perform the volume of emergency station-keeping ops needed to prevent at least a few collisions. GPS satellites are in a much less crowded orbit, they might be OK. Whether or not we've sufficiently fortified the power grids for a Carrington-level event is the real question. Luckily, I can't recall any recent issues with power grids, especially not in my neck of the woods.
From what I have read we are looking at power outages between weeks and a couple years, and that current grids are not significantly protected. https://assets.lloyds.com/assets/pdf-solar-storm-risk-to-the-north-american-electric-grid/1/pdf-Solar-Storm-Risk-to-the-North-American-Electric-Grid.pdf What's up with this? However, magnetic field strength and orientation of incoming plasma – key ingredients in forecasting Earth impacts, can only be measured with a lead time of 15-30 minutes. Additionally, these satellites are all past their mission lives, and replacements are essential for monitoring solar activity in the near future. Improvement in forecasting Earth impacts will only be made by funding research targeted at predicting and continued investment in the infrastructure necessary to measure impulsive solar wind events. It seems to me that the biggest disruption would be due to a total lack of communication afterwards. No phones, no TV, etc. I think radio would probably be the most quickly reliable.Given the potential for large-scale, long-term economic and societal chaos, it is necessary to evaluate preparatory and mitigative measures. There are currently several space satellites in operation that can provide warnings of incoming CMEs on the timescale of hours to days, timescales that could allow grid operators to take preventative measures before the storm hits.
Remember back in 2003 or whatever when that transformer blew in the Niagara region and the entire upper Midwest lost power for about 3 days? It was that hard to fix, and the rest of the country was powered and thus available to help fix the problem. It was the middle of summer and very hot, but I don't exactly remember what we ate for those few days. Refrigeration being absent when it's 90 degrees is less than optimal.
So obviously we have instruments like LASCO (just save yourself some time and go to solarham.com for aggregated data), which can see a CME lift off of the sun in near real-time, but we also have spacecraft orbiting L1, between the Earth and sun, about 30 minutes upstream, measuring the plasma there. One particular component of the interplanetary magnetic field in the upstream solar wind matters far more than the others; The amount of flux along the orientation of Earth's dipole axis. If the IMF is very strong, oriented southwards, and embedded in a very fast and dense solar wind, like that of a CME, that's worst case scenario. "Improvement in forecasting Earth impacts" is like saying "OK so what if we knew the orientation of the magnetic field when it got blasted off from the sun and headed our direction?", or even "OK so what if we knew that a sunspot was going to produce a massive flare and Earthward-directed CME in a few days?". You score a few more days of warning, maximum. So what? The money should be taken from my research field and put towards fortifying our power grids and satellite systems. Sadly, I think that's gonna cost a hella lot more than what we're getting for research funding.