This year’s Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday included spectacular fireworks: a solar radiation storm of historic levels.
A solar radiation storm, ranked at a level four out of five on a severity scale, is being tracked by the National Weather Service’s Space Weather Prediction Center, or SWPC.“An S4 severe solar radiation storm is now in progress – this is the largest solar radiation storm in over 20 years,” SWPC shared on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The last time S4 levels were observed was in October, 2003. Potential effects are mainly limited to space launch, aviation, and satellite operations.”The Halloween space weather storms of October 2003 resulted in power outages in Sweden and damages to power transformers in South Africa, according to SWPC.
During a severe solar storm, the Sun blasts clouds of tiny, fast‑moving charged particles out into space, and some of them slam into Earth’s magnetic field. These particles then race along the magnetic field lines toward the polar regions, where they can dive into the upper atmosphere and stir it up. To people on the ground, they are invisible, but they can make the sky glow with bright auroras and quietly disturb the “space weather” around our planet.
A map created by space weather forecasters show where northern lights are predicted to be visible on Monday night given the increased geomagnetic activity. The further north you are, the better chances you have to see the spectacular aurora borealis.As of the Monday afternoon forecast, the lights were expected to be visible in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, northern Utah, northern Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, northern Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, northern Missouri, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Alaska.
In addition to the beauty, there are some significant hazards…especially for electronics in orbit or the upper atmosphere. The extra particles and energy can damage solar panels, scramble computer circuits, and increase drag on low‑orbit satellites so their paths slowly change. For airplanes, especially those on polar routes, the storm can interfere with radio signals and GPS, leading to patchy communications, navigation errors, and slightly higher radiation exposure for crew and passengers on high‑altitude flights.
In the case of an extreme, once-in-a-century solar storm, individual aircraft would not be the only ones affected, but the entire aviation sector, from traffic control to airports. Because of multiple backup systems, aviation safety would not be compromised, but the efficiency of the operation would suffer causing substantial economic losses and personal discomfort to passengers due to delayed and cancelled flights.Radio bursts from the Sun and changes in the upper atmosphere can provoke large-scale radio blackouts, severely affecting the ability of aircraft and flight control to communicate. Such disturbances would be particularly severe for flights through the polar regions and over the oceans, where alternative communication options might not be available.A solar storm would also impact the ionosphere, the upper layer of the atmosphere which, when disturbed, can seriously degrade radio communications and satellite navigation signals. Intermittent GNSS failures and positioning errors would take place, forcing aircraft to rely on backup navigation systems, such as gyroscopes and accelerometers, ground-based radio beacons, and paper charts.
Hopefully, the impacts will be minimal, with only the stream of spectacular aurora images on social media being notable.
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