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Geomagnetic Storm To Begin Tonight
Kiel Oleson writes: "According to the Kansas City Star and the Space Environment Center, there is an 80% chance that a series of five geomagnetic storms will disrupt communications and power systems. These storms will hit the earth beginning at 5 PM CST today and ending at 5 PM CST tommorow. There is a 40% chance of there being severe or major disruptions in satellite orbits, electrical grids, and radio. The good side? Some of us may be able to see the Aurora! Get those UPS's charged!" Everyone's cell phone working OK?
Whoa.... you are calling Y2K a disaster? Were you up at midnight man? Did anything happen? NO. It is just a bunch of overexadgerated hubris! It will be the same thing, no matter if it is a EM storm, or an earthquake... there is no "taking a step back" - that is just stupid. We must progress to find the solutions... not pause.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
The issue is not with mineral deposits in the ground. It's with mulitple-hundred mile long power lines. When you combine a long conductor with a moving magnetic field you can generate some incredible voltages. When the power grid went down last time it was because the generated voltages were large enough to fry the circuit breakers in the power stations. After the first station went down, the others started trying to kick in extra power to compensate. With the extra voltage fluctuations from the magnetic storm, other stations went down. After a few stations were down, the others were unable to provide enough power for the grid, so the whole thing went down.
As to whether they've fixed things so it won't happen again, I guess we'll see tonight.
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot
How was this offtopic? I bet the idiot moderator didn't even bother to read the fucking post. Moron.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
You properly clarified me; when I vaguely said computer error, I mean "Weather.com"'s computer/server/image spicing/etc, not my computer. Thank you for clarifying me.
If you watch the time delayed image, what you see is the clouds on the left side of The Line fading gradually, which is what I would expect the clouds to to during nightfall. On the right side of the very clearly and probably artificial Line, you see pretty much nothing. The image of North America is probably just a back drop; sub-imposed under the picture of the clouds.
Sorry for fooling you about knowing how weather satellites work; IANA weather satellite expert; I know nothing about the orbits or said sats; or the type and quality of said sats information. Again, I apologize for the implicit deception. Just making some random observations about this.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
__________________
As to whether they've fixed things so it won't happen again, I guess we'll see tonight
I can't talk for all of Canada, but in Quebec it's been fixed years ago. They simply installed giant capacitors at the ends of transport lines, so that DC current is filtered out.
Anyway, I was told that (but does not have proofs of) the whole electrical problem mainly concerned the province of Quebec because of the way the grid is layed out geographically. Big hydroelectric power plants in the northern part of the province, and very long and straight power lines to bring all that to the south. Apparently, the alignment of the lines (north-south) and their lenght (several hundred kilometers) would have helped greatly to generate the DC current that fried everything.
No. It's both.
Quoting from the above link:
There are 765kV lines in the midwest that are 100s of miles long, but they don't have significant problems with geomagnetic storm induced voltages. Similar lines in Canada, where there exists areas of igneous rock, had problems in 1989 during the last solar cycle.
Indeed, most of the problems with these magnetic storms occurs in the transformers. Transformers are non-linear devices and the DC voltage offset created by the storms force the transformers out of the linear part of their operating curves (saturation). This causes all kinds of problems, including localized heating of the transformer core and harmonic currents.
cool as a plasma storm would be, the green flash is indicative of an above ground power transformer blowing. Where I live that happens fairly often during blizzards. The green flash can be seen from miles away.
---
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
Try this program, dude.. it'll tell ya all kinds of stuff like that....
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
--
Funny how this has a greater probability of affecting harm to us tonight than y2k did on Dec 31 after all of our preparations, but this probably won't get much press coverage. If it doesn't have a sexy acronym, the major press doesn't seem to latch on to it. (Nothing against the Kansas City paper, of course.)
What's your damage, Heather?
Great!Another excuse that the piss-poor ISP's in Eastern Ky. will give for lousy service. I have a 4 cylinder 20 kw diesel generator on stand-by--not because of the storm or Y2K,just that the power goes out here every time a bird lands on a power line and farts. I'll have the camcorder ready(withe the DC power cord to plug into my SUV's power).
Geek Hillbilly
Does this mean that the major world powers will be powerless for 12 hours? I can see it now, the world will be taken over by some third world country with a whole bunch of rocks.
The new millennium starts in 36 days. "Fires in the heavens" and "skys turning brilliant colors" are a sign It is coming!
Everyone's cell phone working OK?
Oh, Timothy, dear Timothy -- it probably won't be...that's kind of the point.
As an interesting side benefit, I might actually find a use for all that ramen and cans of baked beans I bought for y2k...
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
-The Professor, Futurama
....go to the IMAGE (Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration) "WIC image" site at: http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/im age /latest_wic.html. The pictures of the nothern hemisphere aurora are updated every few minutes directly from the Far Ultra Violet (FUV) Instrument aboard the sattelite.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Some 90% of Canadians live within some 5% of the contry, a thin strip running along the US border. Most of our natural resources though are further north, where there aren't many people. So this limestone affect probably isn't a major issue, since very few would be affected.
---There is no spoon....---
The office of the US Press Secretary, late at night...
/etc/home/press.
/etc/home/press/bulletins.
Bob the Assistant: Mr Secretary, the, um, special official space bulletins have been uploaded into your account for you to check before release.
Secretary: Thanks Bob.
WHUX - White House Unix (c) (tm), version 6.0 ("Kissinger" release)
(Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T.)
Username: press
Password: ***
$ go to home
Current directory is
$ go to bulletins
Current directory is
$ run "s/extraterrestrial interference/misuse of the metric system/i; s/impending alien invasion/geomagnetic storm/" on all files
Changes effected.
$ send all files to newswire
Email sent.
$ shut down
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I saved this from the last solar storm story on slashdot. (hey, alliteration!)
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/pmap/pmapN.html& lt;/a>
Shows the level of auroral activity in the northern hemisphere. Click around for a southern hemisphere view, ya' lazy bastards.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
Dunno if it's common knowledge or not, but sunspots are linked with solar magnetic activity; the more sunspots, the more magnetic energy (generally). Sunspot activity seems to be cyclic, with a period of somewhere around 11 years.
;D). I'm curious to see what effect (or how large an effect) this is going to have on these systems. It'd be a shame if all the sudden it turns out that these storms were just too disruptive for our technology as it stands. I mean, how would we know this until such a situation arises? I'd be willing to bet that a large-scale study of solar EM-radiation and its effects on electrical/digital systems isn't feasible without the sun's cooperation;). I shudder to think that there might be severe web-blackouts or any such thing... I'd have to *gasp* watch TV. (yeah, yeah... not to mention the possible failures of navigational systems, GPS, missile defense systems, etc, etc... )
Apparently, we're around the maximum of this cycle now, which nicely correlates with these storms... (and here's the random musing)
Obviously this could (and probably will) have some effects on electrical systems here on earth(my home's power pulsed twice this morning, dunno if it's a result of the magnetic storm). What's interesting, to me at least, is that during the last solar maximum, computers/electrical dependant systems weren't quite as ubiquitous as they are now. Astronomers as far back as Galileo have recorded information on sunspots and the possibility of a cycle. But it's not like this had any noticable effect on their lives (like Poor Richard's Almanac getting delayed because the intranet went down). As the man from Britain pointed out above, our increasing reliance on technology has some risks associated with it. I'm not too overly concerned just yet, though. It's not like my electrochemical nerve impulses are gonna get scrambled; as long as those are working, I figure I'm alright;).
I just think it's kind of interesting that the 'Net and the Information Age (sorry to sound like Katz here) happened to begin in a lull in solar activity. Now that systems that are sensitive to solar phenomena are commonplace, I'm thinking we'll notice more or larger effects of these storms on our lives. (ie- 'Napster's down?! Aaaagh!' or even worse; 'I can't get sync!!'
In the sci-fi vein; I'm wondering if we accidentally timed the Information Revolution just right... right now, we're aren't so reliant on technology that a disruption would cause widespread catastrophy. At least we'll get a vague idea of whether or not solar activity should be considered when designing technological component and systems, etc., and who knows, it might save us from ceeertain dooooom later on;D.
Ah, well. End Random Musing.
Life: a sexually trasmitted disease that has a 0% survival rate.
"We've got five different opportunities to get hammered," said forecaster Bill Murtagh of the Space Environment Center in Boulder, Colo.
I'd say they're already pretty hammered.--
All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I'm sure if I gave my fahrenspitzer coils a mailbox they'd get enough credit offers.
After months of haggling with my employeer, I finally gave in and accepted a work cell phone.
Now, when I switch the damn thing off, I can blame the outage on the geomagnetic storms!
LETS HEAR IT FOR THE SUN! WHOOOOHOOO!
Plus, all that y2k water in my store room is starting to develop algae. Better drink it quick!
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
There was a geomagnetic storm over western Chicago about 7-8 months ago. That night I was sitting at my computer, when all the sudden I saw a bright flash outside a window to my left. I figured it was raining, and it was a lightning strike.
A few minutes later, a brownout occurred and my computer rebooted. This happened continuously for about an hour, and after the third instance I just turned it off. At this point I went into my living room, when the power went totally out. I was sitting on my couch in total darkness when suddenly there was a BRIGHT GREEN flash from the window. This was too weird. I had to go outside.
I found that it had become extremely cold. The green flashes continued, and I also started hearing noises not unlike circuits being grounded. That stereotypical zap-zap noise. I must have stayed outside for an hour wondering how often something like that actually happens. I still had no idea what the hell it was, until I remembered that there was a Coronal Mass Ejection the previous night. It was a plasma storm!
I just noticed that; that seems really odd, but I wonder if it related. First off, the line is too well defined and too North/South to make me think of a terminator line. But it couldn't be caused by satellite coverage blackout for the same reasons. Secondly, the places with the visibility problems are on the night side of the terminator, so the satellites shouldn't be affected by solar radition. You would think that because it's night, you would see this, but again, the line is too north/south for a terminator line.
If anything, it is probably just a computer error.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
I was working as an administrator at the wisconsin state fair this summer when their substation blew. Cool stuff, unfortunately it was still light out. Damn the thing was loud. Whatever caused it took out two of the ten transformers and knocked out the whole park until one in the morning.
Having no power at the state fair in the middle of milwaukee on a friday night made for many unhappy vistors...
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
What will this do to all the planes flying around the US; the earlybird holiday travelers, as well as the normal Thanksgiving holiday travelers tomorrow...
Is there anything to be afraid of?
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