Whenever space weather turns bad and a solar storm is approaching, we have to begin to take action to protect our satellite and technological resources.
Space weather generally varies with the 11-year sunspot cycle: the more sunspots you have, the more chances there are for power solar flares and explosions of matter into space. Powerful solar flares can hurl protons and electrons almost to the speed of light. That acceleration produces blasts of X-rays that radiate into space. Both the particles and radiation can disrupt short-wave communication on Earth. Were that not enough, the sun also can spawn billion-ton clouds of plasma and their associated magnetic fields. Traveling at more than 1 million mph, some of these "coronal mass ejections" (CMEs) may arrive at the Earth in only a few days. In many ways, they actually are more noxious than the more familiar solar flares. CMEs pummel Earth's magnetic field like a sledgehammer 1 million miles wide and upset the delicate balances of trapped particles in the Van Allen radiation belts and elsewhere within the boundaries of Earth's magnetic field.
The first indication that space weather has worsened usually is a spectacular auroral display in Arctic regions. When the solar wind hits the Earth's magnetic field, electrons and protons inside the field are accelerated into currents that flow along the gossamer-thin magnetic field lines and converge on the polar regions. Soon after this, satellite can start to experience problems as energetic particles pass through them and begin to disrupt their operation.
For more details about these effects, read the accompanying article
Solar Storms and their Human Impacts by Dr. Sten Odenwald (NASA/IMAGE)
