Strong solar storm could disrupt communications and produce northern lights in US

girlfreddy@lemmy.ca to World News@lemmy.world – 245 points – Strong solar storm could disrupt communications and produce northern lights in US
apnews.com

An unusually strong solar storm headed toward Earth could produce northern lights in the U.S. and potentially disrupt communications this weekend.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a rare geomagnetic storm watch — the first in nearly 20 years. The watch starts Friday and lasts all weekend.

NOAA is calling this an unusual event, pointing out that the flares seem to be associated with a sunspot that’s 16 times the diameter of Earth. An extreme geomagnetic storm in 2003 took out power in Sweden and damaged power transformers in South Africa.

The latest storm could produce northern lights as far south in the U.S. as Alabama and Northern California, according to NOAA.

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My magnetic loop ham radio antenna is ready.

Fairly new to ham, what's nice to listen to during an aurora? Just funny noise bursts? Any antenna precautions so I don't fry my SDR?

NOAA's predicting a Kp index of 8.33, hopefully we'll get some good auroras tonight!

There was a map of my state showing where the aurora would likely be visible.

The area stopped at the county immediately north of mine.

Sigh.

Go out anyways and look north, there's a good chance you'll see something.

I remember watching the aurora from the Bastille Day solar storm in 2000. The whole sky in NorthWestern Ontario was red ... like a red umbrella shimmering down. I've never seen an aurora like it since.

I assume there is like no cloud penetrative? We have light clouds and fog all week and that sucks.

Yeah they can't really be seen through clouds aside from maybe the clouds looking slightly brighter.

The K-index quantifies disturbances in the horizontal component of Earth's magnetic field with an integer in the range 0–9 (...)
The official planetary Kp-index is derived by calculating a weighted average of K-indices from a network of 13 geomagnetic observatories (...)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-index

From the article it looks like it will be starting on the 15th.

It is very strong right now. Hopefully it didn't arrive early and it picks up even more in 10-12 hours

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — An unusually strong solar storm headed toward Earth could produce northern lights in the U.S. and potentially disrupt communications this weekend.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a rare geomagnetic storm watch — the first in nearly 20 years.

NOAA said the sun produced strong solar flares beginning Wednesday, resulting in five outbursts of plasma capable of disrupting satellites in orbit and power grids here on Earth.

Each eruption — known as a coronal mass ejection — can contain billions of tons of solar plasma.

NOAA is calling this an unusual event, pointing out that the flares seem to be associated with a sunspot that’s 16 times the diameter of Earth.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group.

The original article contains 192 words, the summary contains 137 words. Saved 29%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Ohh what I would give to see how the world is without internet services globally for like...a week. Make it your best solar flare sun, nothing but the best

A solar storm of that scale wouldn't just take down Facebook and Twitter for a while, it could destroy critical power infrastructure around the globe that would take months to repair. People would die.

And the state of Texas would make the survivors pay for it instead of the power companies that refused to use previous funding to implement preventive measures.