While recovery occurred
after only a few hours on the first satellite, it took some six months and more
than $70 million to recover the second satellite.
Added were landings and
takeoffs, flight time and other factors that elevated fuel consumption and
costs. Each route change ended up costing more than $100,000.Then in January
2005, some 26 United Airlines flights had to be diverted during a space weather
storm to non-polar routes – to avoid the prospect of high frequency radio
blackouts.
Then in February 2011,
there was a sun eruption experts described as the largest solar flare in four
years. It caused interference in radio communications and global positioning
system signals for aircraft traveling long-distances.
While it was a modest
outburst, experts say it signaled the beginning of an upcoming solar
storm.
The National Aeronautical
and Space Administration along with the National Academy of Sciences is
predicting that the Earth could be subjected to a solar storm maximum as part of
the sun’s 11-year cycle.
If there is a direct hit,
these agencies say that the impact could be catastrophic.
They say, brace yourself,
it could cost upwards of $2 trillion in the first two years, affecting some 160
million people and could take anywhere from four to 10 years to
recover.
“The sun has an activity
cycle, much like hurricane season,” said Tom Bogdan, director of the Space
Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo. “It’s been hibernating for four or
five years, not doing much of anything.”
What scientists have known
for about two centuries is that disruptions occur in varying degrees of
intensity about every 11 years. The problem is that they haven’t been able to
figure out the size of any future solar super storm, although models have been
developed that make suggestions.
The expected solar storm,
called a solar storm maximum, is what NASA and the NAS expect sometime over the
next 24 months.
In an in-depth, 132-page
report funded by NASA and issued by the NAS entitled “Severe Space
Weather Events: Understanding Economic and Societal Impact,” a 2008 study
detailed the potential devastation of solar storms beginning during the
2012-2014 period.
There’s already been a
warning. In late January 2012, the sun unleashed what scientists said was a
charged plasma that space weather watchers said would just miss Earth – that
time.
“Our simulations show
potential to pack a good punch to Earth’s near-space environment,” said Antti
Pulkkinen of the Space Weather Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
in Greenbelt. The plasma blast, Pulkkinen said, was “more of a glancing
blow.”
For that January
occurrence, satellite operators and power companies were alerted. Even though it
bypassed Earth, some communications were affected, especially at high
latitudes.
NASA estimates that the
impending solar storm maximum could perhaps be even more powerful than the one
recorded back in 1859 that had the effect at the time of a massive disruption of
the fledging telegraph system. Then, it produced spectacular aurora displays
that could be seen throughout much of the Western hemisphere.
The 1859 solar storm was
called the Carrington Event, named after the British Astronomer Richard
Carrington who saw the effects of the solar storm and was the first to link sun
activities with the Earth’s geomagnetic disturbances.
NASA experts say that the
size of the impending solar storm maximum will be at least as big as the 1859
Carrington Event. But they say it could have a much greater impact because of
contemporary society’s heavy reliance on electricity.
Drawing from the lessons of
the 1859 Carrington Event and subsequent instances of solar storms, it is
apparent the damage it can cause electric power grids, judging from the effects
on the ‘Victorian Internet” at the time. Such storms also may contribute to the
corrosion of oil and gas pipelines.
These storms also interfere
with high-frequency, very high-frequency and ultra high-frequency radio
communications and navigation signals from GPS satellites. The collateral
effects of space-weather-driven technology failures can include complete
blackouts of high-frequency communications along transpolar aviation routes,
requiring aircraft flying these routes to divert to lower
latitudes.
In comparing various solar
storm events, the 1859 event still looms as the largest, even greater than those
experienced since the dawn of the Space Age.
In looking at potential
events between 2012 and 2014, solar physicist David Hathaway of the National
Space Science & Technology Center, of NASA, said that the magnetic belts of
the sun have begun to turn very fast. He said that many magnetic fields are
being swept up and that a future sunspot cycle is going to be very
intense.
Underlying this concern is
what scientists also determined are major breaks in the Earth’s solar defenses,
caused by the recent discovery of a thick layer of solar particles inside the
Earth’s magnetic field.
To scientists, discovery of
this thick layer of solar particles inside the Earth’s magnetic field strongly
suggests that Earth could experience serious solar storms in the 2012-2014 with
major impacts on civilization’s electrical power sources.
“The sequence we’re
expecting … is just right to put particles in and energize them to create the
biggest geomagnetic storms, the brightest auroras, the biggest disturbances in
Earth’s radiation belts,” said David Sibeck of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight
Center in Maryland.
“So, if all of this is
true, it should be that we’re in for a tough time in the next 11 years,” Sibeck
said.
Recent data from NASA’s
THEMIS satellite has revealed a 6,437-kilometer, or 4,000-mile, thick layer of
solar particles have accumulated and continue to gather within the outermost
part of the magnetosphere, which is a protective bubble created by Earth’s
magnetic field.
The magnetosphere is
supposed to block these solar particles – also referred to as solar winds –
which leave the sun at a million miles an hour, experts say.
“The solar wind is
constantly changing, and the Earth’s magnetic field is buffeted like a wind sock
in gale-force winds, fluttering back and forth in response to the solar wind,”
Sibeck said.
With expected increased
activity with a solar storm maximum, the reaction in the magnetosphere could be
quite dramatic.
This prediction comes from
a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research,
which is headquartered in Boulder, Colo.
NCAR is managed by the
University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and is sponsored by the National
Science Foundation. In turn, the UCAR is a consortium of more than 75
universities nationwide offering post-graduate studies in atmospheric and
related sciences.
“The next sunspot cycle
will be 30 percent to 50 percent stronger than the previous one,” Dikpati said.
If this is true, then scientists believe a solar storm maximum expected between
2013 and 2014 could produce bursts of solar activity second only to the historic
Solar Max of 1958.
During the event in 1958, a
radio blackout ccurred across the entire United States and cut off the country
from the rest of the world. This happened during the Cold War period and when
fires developed in Europe, some people wondered whether war had broken out
again.
This solar maximum also
occurred during the beginning of the Space Age. Sputnik had been launched in
October 1957 and the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, was launched in January
1958.
At the time, there wasn’t
the sophisticated means of measuring solar activity. However, people knew
something potentially big was happening when the Northern Lights were seen three
times in Mexico.
Today, such a solar maximum
would be noticed on mobile phones, global positioning systems, from weather
satellites and the potential effects on the electronics that are so much a part
of everyday life.
Dikpati’s assessment for
the next 11 years is based on what she says is a conveyor belt on the sun. It is
similar to ocean conveyor belt on Earth, except the conveyor belt on the sun is
a current of electrically conducting gas.
According to Dikpati, it
flows from the sun’s equator to the poles and back again. Just as the great
ocean conveyor belt determines Earth’s weather, the solar conveyor belt affects
weather on the sun by controlling the sunspot cycle.
Hathaway said this conveyor
belt effect takes some 40 years for the belt to complete one loop.
“The speed varies anywhere
from a 50-year pace – considered slow – to a 30-year pace, which is considered
fast.”
Hathaway said that when the
belt is turning fast, a considerable number of magnetic fields are being swept
up and that a future sunspot cycle is going to be intense.
“The belt was turning fast
in 1986 to 1996,” Hathaway said.
Dikpati and her NCAR team
are looking to predict what they call cycle 24, which would have up to a 50
percent higher peak than the previous cycle, 23. While some models have stated
that cycle 24 would be smaller than cycle 23, Dikpati said that her “flux
transport dynamo model” has correctly forecast the relative peaks of cycles
16-23 going back to the 1921 event using sunspot area data from previous
cycles.
A computer-simulated
magnetic flux NCAR scientists used to conduct their analysis in 2010 went back
to the 12th cycle, which put solar activity around the year 1880. While that
wasn’t as significant, the most dramatic was the 1958 event referred to earlier
by Dikpati, based on simulated computer modeling. It is the 1958 event that
cycle 24 could begin to match in intensity.
The solar storm maximum of
cycle 24 is expected between 2013 and 2014. Not stopping there, Dikpati and her
team continued simulations to the year 2020, showing solar peaks until then
approximating the peaks for cycle 24.
Dikpati and her team base
the confidence of their analysis on forecasting the previous eight cycles from
surface sunspot area data for preceding cycles.
“We’re entering solar cycle
24,” said University of New Hampshire scientist Jimmy Raeder in forecasting what
could be described as an upcoming Perfect Storm.
“For reasons not fully
understood, CMEs [sun flares] in even-numbered solar cycles – like cycle 24 –
tend to hit Earth with a leading edge that is magnetized north. Such a CME
should open a breach and load the magnetosphere with plasma just before the
storm gets underway. It’s the perfect sequence for a really big
event.”
Read
more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/solar-storm-aftermath-2-trillion-in-fixes/#8m8HBKLXGk1ymIq6.99
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