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NASA's Earth Observatory Shows Solar Flare
staaktdenarbeid writes "In the past few months I became very impressed with the timeliness and quality of NASA's Earth Observatory. When hurricane Isabel struck, their imagery showed me the biggest latte ever made. Now that Southern California is on fire, it takes only a look from outer space to see how bad the sitation really is. And, today, a massive solar flare showed up on their website as soon as it errupted (so to speak). Each of these pictures is accompanied by detailed technical background. And for the rest of us, they also make perfect screen backgrounds. Very cool."
Every time the Sun burps, we up here get a little antsy. The problem is that although we have quite a bit of shielding protecting us from most of the bombardment, the ozone is pretty thin. Certainly, it's not a massive hole like down at the South Pole, but it's definitely noticeable at these latitudes.
It's gotten to the point that we have to wear sunscreen when going outdoors or risk of getting a severe sunburn. It's double the problem because of all the snow which reflects the UV.
But the UV issue really isn't either here or there in regards to this story, which I was hoping to eventually bring the shielding point back around to.
The shielding that we've got is pretty thick, but no match for the massive amount of neutrinos and other charged particles that we are bombarded by. Luckily we've got the VA Radiation Belt as a natural shield.
There ought to be a nice show tonight in the skies!
You can see a pretty cool before picture (note, by before, I mean _yesterday_)...
Before
And now, check out the after (today):
After
A lower poster posted it, but just to make sure this hits your inbox, these large open areas of brush, trees, etc, in the desert might I remind you, burn every so often naturally. The problem is, now there are multi-million dollar VIP homes in those mountains, out in the middle of no where, etc.
Those VIPs make sure they fire department is well equipped to put out brush fires when they happen naturally (lightning, heat + rotting brush, etc). They do not however, line the pockets of the forest commision (or whoever) to go in and clear brush and things which would have burned naturally and completed a carbon cycle, etc. Yes small woodland creatures with big sad eyes die in the fires, they die when the brush is clear, and so on and so forth.
Now a major fire starts (from a pipe bomb, a cigarette, or a lightning strike), the winds pick up and turn it into metal melting house reducing inferno, which we cannot contain, and nature settles it's tab.
I'm no GD tree hugging hippie, but I'm also not in favor of pave it all mentality. Living in Florida I watched houses get built where they had to redo the foundation 4 times in a row because they were building too close to a lake. People are creeping into things which aren't meant to have permanent dwellings put on them. They built this house during a dry season when the lake was low, then 25% of the way through construction, the lake gained 3 feet and the water was lapping over the foundation and washing it away.
Millionaires put a house up in the mountains (fire burns up remeber?) and then they burn to the ground. I'm sorry they have lost all their things, their pictures and memories, but at some point they have to live up to where they are living. No reasonable insurance company should underwrite those homes, or if they are going to, they should be damn sure that the government or the home owners dont have a shake shingle roof on their home, and theres no dry brush etc for 500ft, things like that. That leaves plenty of room for trees, grass, and plants.
(Oh so you know, I live way to close to the Claremont fires, but still well below them, and out of the flood plane too, little research saves us a ton of money on homeowners insurance. People 1/2 mile North of us were evacuated, people 1 mile north of us lost their homes. Hot warm ash fell on our house, but we clear the brush, we have a ceramic tile roof, and we were out there at 2am hosing it all down, just in case.)
Article on solar flares and power outages.
...in the earth itself, and in long distance conductors. The interaction of the [Coronal Mass Ejection] with the Earth is referred to as a geomagnetic storm."
... Typical undesirable effects range from voltage regulation difficulties, to highly nonlinear sinusoidal primary and secondary currents, resulting in circuit breaker tripping; to creation of local hot spots within the transformer, resulting in transformer failure. ... The effects of [Geomagnetically Induced Currents] were dramatically demonstrated during March 1989, when GIC caused a cascading failure in the Quebec Power system, putting nearly nine million customers in the dark, in less than 90 seconds."
"If (when) this flow of charged particles and embedded magnetic field collides with the Earth, it dramatically disrupts Earth's geomagnetic field and ionosphere, changing the terrestrial magnetic fields, and therefore causing currents to flow in the upper ionosphere,
"This current can cause saturation of the large power transformers at either end of the transmission line, creating a host of undesirable effects.
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Take off, every Hoser