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Solar Storm Spurs Awesome Auroras, Goofs Up GPS
A geomagnetic storm is currently lashing the Earth’s atmosphere, creating the potential for brilliant auroras over the top and bottom of the planet, including large sections of Northern Europe, and even dipping as far south into the United States as Tennessee, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
The cause of the increase in auroral activity is a pair of coronal mass ejections from the sun that started heading our way on Sunday and arrived early Monday evening, resulting in what the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in Boulder, Colorado described as a level G4 geomagnetic storm, the most intense seen in the current solar cycle.
A G4 storm is considered severe and has the potential to disrupt some communications infrastructure and parts of the power grid, but is generally not considered dangerous to people on the surface of the Earth (a G5 storm is the highest on the scale). The last G4 storm hit Earth in 2013, whereas a G5 has not been seen in about a decade.
An aurora observed from Fairbanks (Credit: NOAA)
The burst of gas and magnetic field lines from the sun has already resulted in some spectacular aurora sightings early Tuesday morning in Alaska, Canada and Europe, and as far south in the lower 48 states as South Dakota.
So far there have been few reports of disruptions to communications or power service, as the level of intensity as been oscillating between G3 and G4. The magnetic field lines have not been accompanied by any major amount of radiation that could wreak havoc with satellite communications, but the potential still remains for the blasts from the sun to mess with global positioning systems in particular. You may expect to see problems with GPS signal strength and positioning accuracy over the next day or so as a result of the storm, according to NOAA.
In the meantime, up-to-date aurora forecasts are available at NOAA’s Space Weather site. If you grab any spectacular photos, please tweet them to me @ericcmack and I’ll share them around.
