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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."
Of course, this solar flare calls for the obligatory Star Trek joke:
If this were Star Trek, we'd all be dead when the solar flare hits.
That said, the ground images from the Terra satellites are nothing short of amazing. Since I live in Southern California, it really put a perspective on things.
and better yet, just go to some recent aurora pics to see what this one probably will look like...
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!
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
...how far down the US will the Aurora Borealis be showing?
This article says maybe as far as the southern US.
that the public could realise how useful NASA is. If they could see the services that they offer, maybe it would be "politically correct" for Congrees to give them the funding that they need.
New images of the xray sun are being taken by the SXI imager once again. Use of the imager had stopped because of an unexpected over-current problem. The SXI team decided that they could safely operate the instrument at a lower voltage, albeit at the expense of a lower signal to noise ratio. The decision was hastened by the dramatic solar events today.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
You can see a pretty cool before picture (note, by before, I mean _yesterday_)...
Before
And now, check out the after (today):
After
These rampant fires may be wreaking havoc upon insurance companies, but just remember, it is all part of nature. This catastrophe serves to remind us humans we are part of nature, not above it.
Despite how horrific they appear to be, they serve some beneficial role in the grand scheme of things.
In nature forests burn every few decades.
Governments devote a lot of resources to stamping out fires.
The effect of these efforts is to increase the number of trees that haven't burned - yet.
This guarantees that when an unusually dry year comes along there will be a big uncontrollable fire that will be more dangerous to people and more environmentally destructive than what would occur naturally.
Of course it doesn't help that people love to have that little cedar chalet nestled among the pine trees.
This page has a similar picture. It is from NASA's SEAWIFS project. It shows the same fires in a larger area and zoomed out to give a better perspective. Click on the smaller picture to get a gigantic version of the smaller one.
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.)
Uh, if tomorrow's the apocalypse, it's been a good run, y'all. It's been a lotta fun.
"Since the dawn of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun!" - Mr. Burns.
Now it looks like the sun will destroy us! I'll shield my computer with my ashen body so that it might survive.
Electric Monkey Pants
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.
(Note that this first page is a direct link to a frame, the second through sixth frames are accessible by the "next" tags in the right-hand corners.)
Take off, every Hoser
I guess it's good that the nuclear power plants of the design in the U.S CAN'T FREAKING CREATE FALLOUT! If you had to hide somewhere from a fire, the inside of a nuclear power plant would be just about the safest place. These things are built to take on hell.
Just because you watched "Atomic Twister" on TBS Superstation doesn't mean that it's true, indicative of ANYTHING about nuclear power plants, or that if a fire got near a nuclear plant that "they could have a Civ2:CallToPower nuclear fall out zone to clean up."
If there's anything that California, and the U.S. in general, needs, it's more nuclear plants. Or perhaps you don't remember the rolling blackouts of 2002 or whenever caused by a lack of power partially due to the fatally flawed, so-called "environmentally friendly" philosophy of California.
But please. Before you start posting about the dangers to something about which you apparently haven't a clue, read up on it instead of basing your obviously limited knowledge from bad sci-fi movies.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Eraser,
I completely understand and agree with your point - I recently heard that 7 million homes (roughly half) in California are built in extreme fire danger locations (after all, much of California is/used to be desert). I also live in Claremont, and I've watched the fires burn dangerously close 2 times in the past few years.
Here's my question, and I'll pose it to you and the rest of the Slashdot crowd. Ok, we all understand that it's silly to build these homes where they shouldn't go, but what happens when we have so much money that we can live in places we shouldn't? What happens, when we simply overpopulate an area and there ARE no places left to build but in these dangerous locations?
Are we going to tell ordinary people who want basically what everyone else has (a normal home, in a decent neighborhood) that they can't have it because there's nowhere else for them to live? I mean, would YOU want to be that person who can't live somewhere because there's simply no more room left? (I'm just playing devil's advocate here)
I'd love for somebody to answer that one... I for one think more urbanization would have been the answer (build UPWARDS instead of OUTWARDS) but it seems too many people are against it - they want their OWN space.
What do you all think? At some point, something has to give...
-6d
What *I* can't understand is why people think that reference books (even Internet ones) are up to date and provide indebatable evidence or proof. They are at best a snapshot of word meanings by a single author or group. The simple fact is that language constantly changes and sometimes you end up with terms that should be opposites (flammable and inflammable) but actually mean the same thing.
Since you seem interested, I refer you to this periodical or even better, this public radio site and specifically the letter that people send in and the responses. You may or may not like it.
This comment is guaranteed*
*not guaranteed