Power Companies Brace For Solar Storms 111
Hugh Pickens writes "Three large explosions from the sun over the past few days have prompted U.S. government scientists to caution users of satellite, telecommunications and electric equipment to prepare for possible disruptions over the next few days that could affect communications and GPS satellites, leave thousands without power for weeks to months, and might even produce an aurora visible as far south as Minnesota and Wisconsin. 'The concern is if the electric grid lost a number of transformers during a single storm, replacing them would be difficult and time-consuming,' says Rich Lordan, senior technical executive for power delivery and utilization at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). The largest solar storm in recorded history was in 1859, when communications infrastructure was limited to telegraphs. Some telegraph operators reported electric shocks, papers caught fire, and the Northern Lights appeared as far south as Cuba and Hawaii. The first of the three solar explosions from the sun already passed the Earth on Thursday with little impact and the second is passing the Earth now and 'seems to be stronger.' "We'll have to see what happens over the next few days," says space weather scientist Joseph Kunches. '[The third storm] could exacerbate the disturbance in the Earth's magnetic field caused by the second (storm) or do nothing at all.'"
Cell service, too (Score:4, Informative)
Re:bright tuesday (Score:4, Informative)
If anyone actually noticed the date on the article, "Published August 3, 2011" - the solar storms, FYI, were *last week*, and the peak of the impact was last Friday night, and has dropped to pretty much normal since.
Sheesh, if you're gonna panic, at least check something current like spaceweather.com, and not panic over a NatGeo article published about "the coming problem" days after it already came & went, with little impact.
Even better. . . (Score:5, Informative)
might even produce an aurora visible as far south as Minnesota and Wisconsin
The submission is so old, we can say what really happened. Aurora were visible in the United States as far south as Utah [spaceweather.com], Colorado [spaceweather.com], and Nebraska [spaceweather.com]. (Tip-'o-the-hat to SpaceWeather.com [spaceweather.com].)
Re:Getting to be ho-hum.... (Score:5, Informative)
My issue is that Slashdot is "breaking" this story 5 days after National Geographic posted it and days after the storms already past yet the story reads like this is still an imminent event.
The 1989 Quebec Solar Storm, good reading material (Score:4, Informative)
In space, some satellites actually tumbled out of control for several hours. NASA's TDRS-1 communication satellite recorded over 250 anomalies as high-energy particles invaded the satellite's sensitive electronics. Even the Space Shuttle Discovery was having its own mysterious problems. A sensor on one of the tanks supplying hydrogen to a fuel cell was showing unusually high pressure readings on March 13. The problem went away just as mysteriously after the solar storm subsided.
http://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/1/3/12 [ips.gov.au]
Service restoration took more than nine hours. This can be explained by the fact that some of the essential equipment, particularly on the James Bay transmission network, was made unavailable by the blackout. Generation from isolated stations normally intended for export was repatriated to meet Quebec's needs and the utility purchased electricity from Ontario, New Brunswick and the Alcan and McLaren Systems.
By noon, the entire generating and transmission system was back in service, although 17 percent of Quebec customers were still without electricity. In fact, several distribution-system failures occurred because of the high demand typical of Monday mornings, combined with the jump in heating load after several hours without power.
So... It caused a cascading effect, just like the most recent New York blackout, scary stuff if it occured across even a marginal size of the USA.
Re:Cell service, too (Score:4, Informative)
We're talking about microsecond-accuracy clocks. Even good quartz clocks drift too fast.
There's the same problem in synchronous optic networks - endpoints _must_ be perfectly synchronized or it doesn't work at all. That's why communication companies are the biggest buyers of precise atomic clocks.
The problem is, a lot of endpoints now use simple GPS receivers and not atomic clocks.
Re:Cell service, too (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How do we know the third storm is coming? (Score:3, Informative)
This is hurting my brain a little. How do we know a third storm is coming when it's traveling at the speed of light toward us?
The photons from a solar storm (primarily, the x-rays) travel at the speed of light.
What's damaging, though, are the charged particles (primarily protons) emitted by the sun. These do not travel at the speed of light.
So you see it coming before it gets here.
Re:Cell service, too (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How do we know the third storm is coming? (Score:2, Informative)
A photon is the basic unit of light and all other electromagnetic radiation (radio waves/etc), it has no mass, and travels at the speed of light. When the Sun produces a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), the key word is "mass" -- on average a CME contains about 1.7 billion tons of matter. Matter cannot travel at the speed of light. So 8 minutes after the CME, the photons arrive and you can observe that there was a CME. But the actual mass usually takes 1 to 5 days to arrive here from the Sun.