Latest Solar Gobbledygook

[ZoWie]

We have a report of a lawn mower that uses GPS going off course and taking out at least part of a flower bed. I didn't know they were putting GPS into lawn mowers now, let alone that a geomagnetic storm could confuse them. I knew most new farm machines use it.

Well they are, and it did. On the upside, the cycle is past peak, so maybe the flower bed is now safe for another 10 years.

Maybe not.

[Number6]

We have a report of a lawn mower that uses GPS going off course and taking out at least part of a flower bed. I didn't know they were putting GPS into lawn mowers now, let alone that a geomagnetic storm could confuse them. I knew most new farm machines use it.

Well they are, and it did. On the upside, the cycle is past peak, so maybe the flower bed is now safe for another 10 years.

Maybe not.

I could see where a "robotic" lawn mower doing that but if it was one where a person operated it then it wasn't the GPS' fault. It was the idiot who was operating the lawn mower.

[ZoWie]

The lawn mower is completely guided by GPS. It looks a bit like a miniature tank, running on tracks so it can turn on a dime, and it's said to be accurate to a few centimeters. The owner of this one swears it's usually spot-on, but this time it went happily off into the flower beds.

GPS is standard equipment on farms nowadays. Usually the farm has a DGPS transmitter at a carefully surveyed location. The acronym stands for Differential GPS. It's about the size of a lunch box, and sits on a sturdy tripod. It has a short range, and it provides a known location reference that allows corrections to the signals coming down out of the sky, giving them a more accurate reference. Accuracy is increased from meters to centimeters. This works unless GPS signals are heavily phase shifted due to atmospheric effects on the downlink, then correction becomes impossible.

I don't know how they do GPS on an ordinary home. Maybe there's a cheaper version of DGPS or another way to get a reference.

NASA/NOAA keep track of GPS errors. They increase by magnitudes in a major solar storm, because the phasing of the downlink signals gets messed up. Navigators get advisories of expected errors, homeowners don't. This guy's wonder mower which saved him endless pushing around suddenly was less of a wonder.

[ZoWie]

Did the recent solar storm cause the grounding of Airbus fly by wire planes?

No hard facts seem available but the timing seems right. All the company is saying is that a vulnerability to "intense solar radiation" caused a loss of altitude in one plane, exposing a problem with the control software that had to be patched sooner rather than later. The planes were immediately put out of service, usually for only a few hours, until the patch could be applied. The timing, right over Thanksgiving, was not optimum, especially since American Airlines makes heavy use of these planes.

I can't find a precise timing of the incident that exposed the problem, but the vague non-technical explanations in the media make it sound like the kind of thing that solar proton events can do. Of course we had one of those a few weeks back, after a major mass ejection.

An expert quoted by BBC seems to concur. He has a Ph.D. in this stuff.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cvg4y6g74ert

Former Qantas captain Dr Ian Getley, who holds a PHD in cosmic and solar radiation in aviation, says flights can be affected by coronal mass ejections (CME), which is when plasma is ejected from the sun into space.

The higher the severity of the CME, the more likely it is that issues could arise with satellites and aircraft electronics above 28,000 ft (8.5 km), he tell us.

A CME releases heavily charged particles that shoot into the Earth's atmosphere.

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[ZoWie]

The patch to the Airbus software may be getting its first test soon. Some really awesome sunspots are rotating into position. Along with the monthly return of the coronal holes, it could be an "interesting" two weeks.

[ZoWie]

This guy notes that the A320 incident that caused the software update actually happened before the recent solar storm. He does, however, quote someone who thinks that all the publicity about increased solar activity did focus attention on the issue, speeding up the recall.

https://www.spaceweather.com/

Coincidentally, less than two weeks after the JetBlue incident, there was a significant solar-radiation event. On Nov. 11th, an X-class solar flare triggered the strongest ground-level event (GLE) in nearly 20 years. Energetic particles flooded Earth's atmosphere, doubling radiation levels at aviation altitudes (shown in the map above).

Dyer and colleagues analyzed the storm and found that bit-flips in computer memory could have occurred at a rate of ~60 errors per hour per gigabyte. No flight anomalies were reported, he notes, but "I can only believe that the Nov. 11th event focused minds on this problem."

[ZoWie]

It appears that solar cycle 25 is going out with a bang. Right now three sunspot groups have combined to create one huge supergroup that is somewhat larger than the one observed by Carrington in the 19th century. That one, of course, caused the infamous "Carrington Event," in which ground currents caused some telegraph offices to catch fire, while others reported that their equipment worked better when its batteries were disconnected, allowing the ground currents to power the system. A somewhat smaller event in 1956 caused a lesser effect which still gets mentioned in science papers. There are stories of lights blinking on and off in rural areas served by long power lines.

Obviously something like this happening in today's AI-powered, Internet-connected culture would border on catastrophic, which is why people follow all this solar gobbledygook in the first place.

This current supergroup has done nothing of the sort, but it has a week or two to go before it rotates off the Earth facing side of the sun.

Airbus did the right thing in grounding the A32x planes for immediate software updates, even though it happened at the height of the Thanksgiving rush.

[ZoWie]

The mega-group of sunspots did put out a strong solar flare just as it rotated off the solar disk visible from Earth. A strong mass ejection event took place, but missed this planet. The scientific name for this process is "dodging a bullet."

All solar-terrestrial watches have been cancelled until the next time something noteworthy happens.

[ZoWie]

Guess what. We dodged the bullet but some of the energy cranked up the aurora anyway. Far as the US goes, most of the people who'd have seen it were too busy shoveling snow and clearing roads to see anything through the dense clouds.

I don't know if anyone watches Highway Through Hell. It's been on various reality channels for 13 years now and it describes the hard work that people in BC do to keep roads open and goods moving. Two years ago they had the worst flood ever, and half the season was about the aftermath.

They're now having another one.

This is unheard of.

But keep sending troops and capturing Venezuelan tankers. SO much more important to gin up a war than to save the goddamn planet.

[ZoWie]

Story going around the net that some science type wrote a report on how close we came to it raining aluminum in the big solar storm a few months back. Apparently Starlink was within minutes of losing a good percentage of its 30,000-satellite constellation. Since there have been much bigger solar storms than that one recorded in tree rings, the general consensus is that Starlink wouldn't be usable after a real Carrington level event. Elon Musk had better have good insurance.

In general, it provides further evidence that the current fad among the out-of-touch billionaire class to put up thousands of LEO satellites is a disaster waiting to happen.

[ZoWie]

A new science journal publication describes the results of a study in which ADS-B aircraft position surveillance in Europe stopped being reliable during the big solar storm last May. That was the one that got the geomagnetic activity index called Kp to 9.0, as high as it goes. (A more typical Kp is around three, and since it's a quasi-logarithmic scale, that's a whole lot lower than it looks.)

ADS-B is an automatic aircraft position reporting system carried by all commercial aircraft and many private ones. It's where those aircraft tracking sites that you see online get their position plots. On a good day, it's very accurate. Generally if the LAPD helicopter leaves its ADS-B on (they don't always), the position shown on the screen is almost identical to where I can see the chopper is.

The study showed ADS-B positions jumping all over the place, some showing up hundreds of km from where the plane really was. Not a good day at all.

Don't get rid of redundant aircraft location systems just yet................

[ZoWie]

I'm not into astrology, so I don't know what people who are into that stuff make of Venus, Mars, and Mercury all coming together right next to the sun. It's a big time conjunction for sure, but you'll go blind if you try to look at it.

Even the planets are lining up. These are nervous times.

[ZoWie]

Around 10 AM LA time we had the first X class flare in quite a while. Position and observed effects suggest a mass ejection aimed directly at Earth. We'll know more in a couple of days.

[ZoWie]

The X class flare lasted a full 24 hours. That is remarkable. It's much longer than usual.

Major radio bursts came at light speed. The relativistic protons made it here at close to light speed, and a major proton storm is in progress. If your power fails, it's either that or some bozo drove into a pole.

The other effects take 2-3 days to get here, and since we're already at the G3 storm level, when all the other ejected mass comes you can probably kiss the ionosphere goodbye for a day or so. Radio propagation has already stopped completely in the polar regions, and they expect pretty disturbed conditions to start everywhere else any time now. Charged particles will work their way south and juice up the equatorial ring current, which causes several phenomena of interest mostly to scientists and weather forecasters.

It's going to be a very bad time to be flying at high altitudes. Increased cosmic ray exposure is guaranteed. In addition, some aircraft navigation systems are disrupted, especially on the North Atlantic routes. Most of these depend on GPS, radio navigation stations, or satellite communication. All of these are degraded right now.

I don't know if we will get to G5, which is when all that stuff they warn you about on the Weather Channel actually happens, but G4 seems like a foregone conclusion.

It's not really the prime aurora season, given cloud cover and other issues, but the photos have already started melting the Internet, and we're just getting started. Some have been very dramatic indeed.

[ZoWie]

The CME reached Earth early, around 1900 UTC (11 AM Pacific). One measurement of proton radiation has exceeded 4 (the "severe" level) for the first time since 2003. The Kp index, which measures shifts in the planet's magnetic field, instantly jumped from 3 (a bit on the low side) to well over 8, almost as high as it can go (which is 9.0). That is a very noteworthy event.

It's apparently a clear night in Sweden. A truly breathtaking aurora photo is making the net rounds. It shows bright red aurora high in the sky, with green aurora closer to the horizon.

[ZoWie]

Well, right after our last post, the Kp did hit 9, though it's down a bit now. That happens once or twice per 11-year cycle, and it's the second time in this go-round.

Fantastic aurora in Europe, some of the best ever. The US dark hours came a bit later, and it was not as strong, but still some people got photos. (These are almost always time exposures, btw, generally by experienced people with expensive cameras on tripods, but visual aurora is still pretty amazing in some places.) All the photos show bright red aurora covering half the sky, with bright green near the horizon. Pretty awesome. Takes your mind off the psychopath we elected president, and his assembled cabinet of barrel-bottom sludge.

[ZoWie]

The geomagnetic storm is subsiding after three days, which is a long one as these go. Radio propagation remains quite degraded, especially in polar latitudes, but we seem to have escaped any major power failures. We got lucky.

One good aurora picture comes from Southern California. It was out on the desert where there's no light pollution. In keeping with the generally rather wussy aurora this far south, it was dim and mostly red, but the time exposure looks quite nice with the Joshua trees in the foreground. It may be 10 years before we see the likes of that again.

[ZoWie]

Last week's storm was so strong that the air over parts of northern Europe still glows in the dark.

[ZoWie]

Active Region #4366 is growing rapidly, and proving there's still some surprises left in this solar peak. It blew an X-flare that barely missed creating another geomagnetic storm. It did degrade radio propagation over the poles. The region is moving into geoeffective position soon, so we shall see what we shall see.

I don't know if this high flaring activity correlates with the crazy "winter" in North America, since my degree is in movies. I can tell you how to project old nitrate prints without burning the theater down, but I'll have to leave meteorology to the meteorologists.

[ZoWie]

Active Region #4366 is a real nasty mo-fo. In the past 24 hours it has caused 4 X-class flares and 23 smaller ones. This is spectacular. I don't think it correlates with the polar cap anomaly, seeing as that started a week or so earlier, but it certainly does appear that the gods are angry.

[ZoWie]

AR 4366 is still it, with a long duration X class flare still in progress at this time. It has flared continuously for three days now, and shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, it is getting stronger. Usually these active regions dissipate their energy by this point, but this one is still growing. It's a real surprise.

There have not been strong terrestrial events related to this activity, despite its amazing energy. This might change, but we got lucky on the region's position, a bit farther from the solar equator than some other events. Radio propagation remains quite stable, except for brief blackouts after the bigger flares. There has been no threat to power grids, etc..

NASA just postponed the Artemis launch until next month, but the reason seems to be hardware, not the solar activity.

Just when you think we finally understand the sun, it comes up with some kind of surprise like this.

[ZoWie]

This must be getting boring, but AR 4366 has just blasted out an X4.2 flare, second biggest of the recent series. Geomagnetic storming has begun, but it's surprisingly weak. This region is only halfway across the sun, so the fun continues. A region this active must have happened before, but not in my memory. It has several more days to go before it rotates off the Earth-facing disk, and it shows no sign whatsoever of declining.

Perhaps Trump has angered the gods.

[ZoWie]

Possibly some weak aurora tonight, though most parts of North America will be too cloudy to see it. Kp index got up to 5, nothing spectacular, but aurora has been photographed by the usual people. AR 4366 has remained as active as when it was first discovered, and continuous solar flaring persists.

Most sunspots never produce a substantial flare. This one has done it every couple of hours for at least 5 days, and probably longer.

[ZoWie]

Region 4366 quieted down somewhat, but it still remains active as it starts to rotate away from the side of the sun that faces Earth. It retains its almost historic size, definitely in the Carrington class of major solar events. We'll see if it returns in a few weeks.