NASA Confirms Solar Storm Near 2012

An anonymous reader writes "`This week researchers announced that a storm is coming — the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one," she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.`

`Dikpati's forecast puts Solar Max at 2012. Hathaway believes it will arrive sooner, in 2010 or 2011.`

Anyone familiar with the Mayan Calendar? December 21, 2012 (13.0.0.0.0 in the Mayan Calendar) Coincidence?"

Comments

Umm, old news?

[Zarhan]

The article is dated March 10, 2006.

Sweet!

[DoctorPepper]

Looks like I need to really get to work on my Elecraft K1. With a solar maximum like they're predicting, QRP is going to be awesome!

Re:Coincidence

[Bacon Bits]

The Gregorian calendar has leap years as follows:
Every year divisible by 4 is a leap year.
Except when that year is also divisible by 100, in which case it is *not* a leap year.
Except when that year is also divisible by 400, in which case it *is* a leap year.

Hence 2000 was a leap year. 2100 will not be.

The fun hokeyness is due to the Western assumption that everything is linear, in spite of the fact that we repeat months, days of months, and days of weeks constantly. We don't find it odd that there are thousands of Wednesdays or March 21sts, but somehow we can't understand there ever being more than one 2007.

Remember Galaxy 4?

[Pontiac]

Funny how people forget..

When Galaxy 4 died it took out 80% of the pagers in the US plus several video feeds used by the major networks (I worked for CBS at the time)

This was 2 years before the 2000 Solar max when solar activity was ramping up.
More storms in 2003 took out power in parts of Switzerland and killed 2 Satellites

There were several solar flare warnings around that time.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast14jul_2 m.htm

July 14, 2000 -- This morning NOAA satellites and the orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) recorded one of the most powerful solar flares of the current solar cycle. Space weather forecasters had been predicting for days that an intense flare might erupt from the large sunspot group 9077, and today one did.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/power_outage _031031.html

The sixth in an unprecedented series of strong space storms dished out by the Sun over a 10-day period plowed past Earth Thursday, apparently cutting power to 20,000 Swedish customers. The powerful series of outbursts also claimed two satellites as casualties while fueling a host of minor disruptions to radio broadcasts and airline flight plans.

http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/articles/eisbaker.html

A very intense flux of electrons, evident in the magnetosphere earlier this year, may have caused a satellite failure (or at least exacerbated the situation) leading to the loss of telephone pager service to 45 million customers, research has shown. The electrons, known as highly relativistic electrons (HREs), were especially numerous in the weeks preceding the failure. Researchers say HREs have triggered spacecraft anomalies in the past when fluxes are elevated. They therefore believe this energetic electron event could have been behind the failure of the attitude control system of the Galaxy 4 spacecraft at 2200 UT on May 19, 1998. A backup system also failed, either at the same time or earlier, so operators were unable to maintain a stable Earth link.

Galaxy 4 is a heavily used communication satellite at geostationary orbit*. Its sudden failure caused not only widespread loss of pager service but also numerous other communication outages. Using a wide array of datasets, our team of scientists analyzed the space environment for the times in question and found evidence of highly disturbed solar, solar wind*, and geomagnetic conditions in late April and early May. The combination of coronal mass ejections*, solar flares*, and high speed solar wind streams led to a powerful sequence of interplanetary disturbances that hit the Earth. These disturbances produced a deep, powerful, and long-lasting enhancement of the HRE population throughout the outer Van Allen radiation zone. The kinds of disturbances witnessed are indicative of the types of events that may commonly occur during the approaching peak in solar activity in the years 2000 and 2001. It will be most important to determine how well space systems can stand up to the multifaceted effects of the space environment over the next several years.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/ cell_phone_020306.html

Next time your cell phone drops acall, don't rush to blame your service provider. The culprit may well be anangry Sun.

A new study of 40 years of solardata shows that during peaks in activity, bursts of energy from the Sun canpotentially cause dropped calls for some cell phone users across wide areastwice per week. The problem is caused when radio waves associated with thebursts hit cell phone towers, creating static that overwhelms the signal at thetower, where calls are relayed.

T

Metanotice

[Anonymous Coward]

Before modding this guy up you might want to see his previous templated posts and refutations:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=221906&cid=179 81692
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=227015&cid=183 90093
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=225014&cid=182 30822
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=220006&cid=178 42262

I wonder how much he's getting paid to do this...or if he's really as demented as his posts seem to imply.

Re:Oh nooo!!!

[Theaetetus]

3.) Mars is experiencing the same climate change that Earth is. (source: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/ [space.com] mars_snow_011206-1.html and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/new s/news.html?in_article_id=410901&in_page_id=1770 [dailymail.co.uk]) How can you explain the recent same climate changes on different planets? I doubt it's all those cars being driven there.

Debunked almost two years ago. Sheesh.

Bullshit alert.

[SETIGuy]

1.) Apparently, the Earth magnetic field has decreased by 10% in the last 150 years (source: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/earth_magnet ic_031212.html). I'm an electrical engineer and during my studies in particle physics, I learned that a particles velocity can be affected by magnetic fields. I believe it's possible that more of the Sun's radiation is penetrating the Earth's magnetosphere ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_magnetic_fiel d ) due to it being weaker. If more radiation hits the Earth, shouldn't that also increase the overall temperature of the Earth and can global warming be attributed to this?

No. The total energy of charged particles impacting the upper atmosphere is tiny compared with the solar light energy Compare for example, the intensity of the aurora with the intensity of sunlight. Now add in the fact that the aurora covers a tiny fraction of the earths surface while sunlight blankets half of the earth at any time.

Even if it were a significant amount of energy, this energy is entirely absorbed by the atmosphere at altitudes above 60km. You would need to come up with a plausible mechanism for transporting this radiation down into the lower atmosphere without increasing the temperature of the stratosphere.

2.) Jupitor is experiencing the same climate change that Earth is.

No, it isn't. The change on Jupiter is regional, not global. There is no indication that it is related to any solar phenomenon.

3.) Mars is experiencing the same climate change that Earth is.

No, it isn't. Mars is losing CO2 ice near its South Pole. The most likely explanation is that large dust storms from recent years dumped some dust on the ice causing it to absorb sunlight and sublime. This sublimation may cause warming by increasing the CO2 and H2O content of the Martian atmosphere. This might feedback into causing more ice to evaporate. Since there isn't an active carbonate silicate cycle on Mars due to lack of liquid water, there is nothing to prevent this from occurring. So it's likely that the Martian climate experiences warming of this type in a cyclical manner, and that the warming will continue until something else stops it. For example the reduction in the temperature difference between the poles and the equatorial regions might slow the winds enough that the dust storms stop allowing increased precipitaion of CO2 onto the poles. There is no equivalent mechanism at work on Earth.

4.) The United Nations found that there is more Methane produced from livestock, which raises global temperature greater than CO2 by a factor of approx. 20

However the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is more than 20 times longer than the residence time of methane.

[5.) What about the ice ages. We didn't cause them!]

But wait officer, there were forest fires before there were people. Therefore it couldn't have been my campfire that started it.

But wait officer, people can die without being murdered. Therefore it doesn't matter whether my fingerprints are on the gun.

[A pile of other pointless crap designed to confuse the issues deleted.]

Point 1 you could have gotten wrong just because you don't know anything about atmospheric science. The rest just puts you in the denial camp. Drop the political agenda for a while and see reality.