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Solar Storm Heading Toward Earth

The world is already grappling with war, plague and climate change.  Now comes word of another threat – space weather.  Scientists have issued a strong Geomagnetic Storm Watch for Saturday.

The sun in a massive ball of energy and a generous star that sometimes sends electro-magnetic bursts our way.  Tom Bogdan is President of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and an expert on space weather and solar flares..

“I like to think of a flare kind of as an equivalent of a tornadic event.  It’s small, it’s very energetic and very hard to predict, and then there are large ejections of material from the coronal mass of the sun, which we imaginatively call coronal mass ejections, and these look a lot like hurricanes or big tsunamis in space.”

When this energy from the sun comes our way, it can play havoc with our hardware – something we’ve known since a powerful solar storm, known as the Carrington Event, hit the planet in 1859.

“The telegraph operators were some of the first people to notice it, because they were able to send their transmission without the batteries that sat at each end to allow the signals to transfer, and then in extreme cases such as the Carrington event there were fires and sparking and just way too much current showing up at those places.”

Today, Bogdan says, we’ve got even bigger worries. 

“A Carrington event today, without the power grid taking any kind of action would be absolutely catastrophic.  There’s no question about that.  Many transformers along the east coast would certainly be damaged, many of them beyond repair.”

And satellites that lack sufficient shielding could be destroyed.  Fortunately, Bogdan says critical satellites have protection, utility companies are prepared, and many federal agencies have planned extensively to ward off problems in the event of severe space weather.