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Solar wind flowing from this coronal hole should reach Earth on July 4-5. Credit: SDO/AIA.
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Coronal Hole 3 July 2012
04 Wednesday Jul 2012
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04 Wednesday Jul 2012
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Solar wind flowing from this coronal hole should reach Earth on July 4-5. Credit: SDO/AIA.
Wonder what that means for us, will we feel it?
We may be hit by three solar events – an X-class flare, CME, and coronal hole solar wind geomagnetic storm, all about the same time. The sunspots and coronal hole right now face the earth, and if they score a direct hit on earth, they can certainly cause disruptions in the power grid and affect communication and other satellites, as well as disrupt radio communications.
Here’s some history on effects of recent solar storms, from Wikipedia:
On March 13, 1989 a severe geomagnetic storm caused the collapse of the Hydro-Québec power grid in a matter of seconds as equipment protection relays tripped in a cascading sequence of events.[2][12] Six million people were left without power for nine hours, with significant economic loss. The storm even caused aurorae as far south as Texas.[3] The geomagnetic storm causing this event was itself the result of a coronal mass ejection, ejected from the Sun on March 9, 1989.[13] The minimum of Dst was -589 nT.
On July 14, 2000, an X5 class flare erupted on the Sun (known as the Bastille Day event) and a coronal mass ejection was launched directly at the Earth. A geomagnetic super storm occurred on July 15–17; the minimum of the Dst index was – 301 nT. Despite the strength of the geomagnetic storm, no electrical power distribution failures were reported.[14] The Bastille Day event was observed by Voyager 1 and Voyager 2[15], thus it is the farthest out in the solar system that a solar storm has been observed.
Seventeen major flares erupted on the Sun between 19 October and 5 November 2003, including perhaps the most intense flare ever measured on the GOES XRS sensor – a huge X28 flare,[16] resulting in an extreme radio blackout, on 4 November. These flares were associated with CME events which impacted the Earth. The CMEs caused three geomagnetic storms between Oct 29 and November 2 during which the second and third storms were initiated before the previous storm period had fully recovered. The minimum Dst values were -151, -353 and -383 nT. Another storm in this event period occurred on November 4 – 5 with a minimum Dst of -69.nT. The last geomagnetic storm was weaker than the preceding storms because the active region on the Sun had rotated beyond the meridian where the central portion CME created during the flare event passed to the side of the Earth. The whole sequence of events is known as the ‘Halloween Storm’.[17] The Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) operated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was offline for approximately 30 hours due to the storm.[18] The Japanese ADEOS-2 satellite was severely damaged and the operation of many other satellites were interrupted due to the storm.[19]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_storm