“Met Office to offer daily space weather forecasts”

Solar eruption Source: BBC News

According to BBC News report, Met office will begin offering “space weather forecasts” this coming Spring, amidst growing awareness that solar activity can have powerful effects on Earth’s grid.

Here’s more from the report:

The 24 hour service will aim to help businesses and government departments by providing early warnings of solar storms that can disrupt satellites, radio communications and power grids.

The first forecast is expected to be available next spring.

The Department for Business will support the scheme with £4.6m of funding over the next three years.

The Met Office will aim to develop better ways of predicting space weather in collaboration with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

UK partners involved in the project include the British Geological Survey, Bath University and RAL Space.

Space weather is driven by energetic particles from the Sun.

Solar flares and eruptions in the Sun’s atmosphere – known as coronal mass ejections – are powerful sources of potentially destructive solar storms.

Read the rest, click here.

“Persistent Coronal Hole (CH577)” – July 30, 2013

Description:

Published on 30 Jul 2013

Recorded on July 16, 2013 | 00h30-23h30 UTC
Second rotation for this massive coronal hole CH577 (ancient CH574). CH577 is fixed on the northern hemisphere with a partial geoeffective position.
A coronal hole is an unipolar magnetic field opens towards the interplanetary space. On composite wavelengths of UV light, a coronal hole appear dark because there is less matter at the T° we are observing in. Here, the transition between wavelengths works well.
SDO combined AIA | Full HD Quality Video | 1920x1080p

A large coronal hole spotted near north pole of Sun

 

“The European Space Agency/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, captured this image of a gigantic coronal hole hovering over the sun’s north pole on July 18, 2013, at 9:06 a.m. EDT. Credit: ESA&NASA/SOHO” – Source: Phys.org

A massive coronal hole appeared on July 18th, 2013 near the north pole of the Sun.

Phys.org has a report on this coronal hole and the solar winds that come with it.  This report states, “The holes are important to our understanding of space weather, as they are the source of a high-speed wind of solar particles that streams off the sun some three times faster than the slower wind elsewhere.“

According to the report, the cause of coronal holes is “unclear“.

The holes are important to our understanding of space weather, as they are the source of a high-speed wind of solar particles that streams off the sun some three times faster than the slower wind elsewhere. While it’s unclear what causes coronal holes, they correlate to areas on the sun where magnetic fields soar up and away, failing to loop back down to the surface, as they do elsewhere.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-large-coronal-hole-sun-north.html#jCp

The holes are important to our understanding of space weather, as they are the source of a high-speed wind of solar particles that streams off the sun some three times faster than the slower wind elsewhere. While it’s unclear what causes coronal holes, they correlate to areas on the sun where magnetic fields soar up and away, failing to loop back down to the surface, as they do elsewhere.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-large-coronal-hole-sun-north.html#jCp

“Space weather could now cause trillions in damage” – The Seattle Times

“View of the Northern Lights over the Flathead River early June 29, east of Kalispell, Mont. Experts say space-weather impacts on the Earth pose greater threats as dependency on electricity increases.” Photo credit: Brenda Ahearn – The Associated Press Source: SeattleTimes.com

Reporter Brad Plumer writes, “Today, electric utilities, telecommunications providers and the insurance industry are grappling with a scary possibility: a solar storm that would wreak havoc on power grids, pipelines and satellites.”

From the report:

The auroras of 1859, known as the “Carrington Event,” came after the sun unleashed a large coronal mass ejection, a burst of charged plasma aimed directly at the Earth. When the particles hit our magnetosphere, they triggered a fierce geomagnetic storm that lit up the sky and frazzled communication wires around the world. Telegraphs in Philadelphia were spitting out “fantastical and unreadable messages,” one paper reported, with some systems unusable for many hours.

Today, electric utilities, telecommunications providers and the insurance industry are grappling with a scary possibility. A solar storm on the scale of that in 1859 would wreak havoc on power grids, pipelines and satellites. In the worst case, it could leave 20 million to 40 million people in the Northeast without power — possibly for years — as utilities struggled to replace thousands of fried transformers stretching from Washington to Boston. Chaos and riots might ensue.

That’s not a lurid sci-fi fantasy, but rather a sober new assessment by Lloyd’s of London, the world’s oldest insurance market. The report notes that a smaller solar-induced geomagnetic storm in 1989 left 6 million people in Quebec without power for nine hours.

Read the full report, click here.

“All survive after jet lands in sea off Bali” – BBC

Source: BBC News

From the BBC report:

An airliner has ended up in the sea off the Indonesian island of Bali after missing Denpasar airport runway, but all those on board survived.

Hospitals treated 22 people after the crash, which involved an Indonesian Lion Air plane carrying 101 passengers and seven crew.

Photos posted on Twitter showed the jet with its fuselage cracked, sitting in water near rocks, with dinghies nearby.

The Boeing 737 was on a domestic flight from Bandung in West Java.

It’s a miracle that everyone on board was spared, as a passenger on the jet was reported as saying that, “The plane plunged into the sea at high speed.”

Susan Rennison commented on her website about this jet crash.  She states:

Was this a satellite navigation fail? It sounds like there was not much room for failure… Well, I don’t care whether authorities want to blame the pilots. In a chaotic Geomagnetic/EM environment with military spokesmen and others screaming about the problems with GPS and associated navigation systems (see archives), generating regular reports of billion dollar submarines and tankers crashing, we all have a right to wonder. I don’t know if there are solutions to fixing the problem of inaccurate navigational data, but at the moment, space weather is roiling the ionosphere and the result is there will be more major incidents where locational precision is vital. Whatever, I would like to congratulate the pilots that nobody died when the plane hit the water.

“NRL scientists produce densest artificial ionospheric plasma clouds using HAARP”

About the photo: “Sequence of images of the glow plasma discharge produced with transmissions at the third electron gyro harmonic using the HAARP HF transmitter, Gakona, Alaska. The third harmonic artificial glow plasma clouds were obtained with HAARP using transmissions at 4.34 megahertz (MHz). The resonant frequency yielded green line (557.7 nanometer emission) with HF on November 12, 2012, between the times of 02:26:15 to 02:26:45 GMT.”
Source: U.S, Naval Research Laboratory

News release dated the 25th of February 2013, from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory:

U.S. Naval Research Laboratory research physicists and engineers from the Plasma Physics Division, working at the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) transmitter facility, Gakona, Alaska, successfully produced a sustained high density plasma cloud in Earth’s upper atmosphere.

“Previous artificial plasma density clouds have lifetimes of only ten minutes or less,” said Paul Bernhardt, Ph.D., NRL Space Use and Plasma Section. “This higher density plasma ‘ball’ was sustained over one hour by the HAARP transmissions and was extinguished only after termination of the HAARP radio beam.”

These glow discharges in the upper atmosphere were generated as a part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored Basic Research on Ionospheric Characteristics and Effects (BRIOCHE) campaign to explore ionospheric phenomena and its impact on communications and space weather.

Using the 3.6-megawatt high-frequency (HF) HAARP transmitter, the plasma clouds, or balls of plasma, are being studied for use as artificial mirrors at altitudes 50 kilometers below the natural ionosphere and are to be used for reflection of HF radar and communications signals.

Past attempts to produce electron density enhancements have yielded densities of 4 x 10⁵ electrons per cubic centimeter (cm³) using HF radio transmissions near the second, third, and fourth harmonics of the electron cyclotron frequency. This frequency near 1.44 MHz is the rate that electrons gyrate around the Earth’s magnetic field.

The NRL group succeeded in producing artificial plasma clouds with densities exceeding 9 x 10⁵ electrons cm³ using HAARP transmission at the sixth harmonic of the electron cyclotron frequency.

Optical images of the artificial plasma balls show that they are turbulent with dynamically changing density structures. Electrostatic waves generated by the HAARP radio transmissions are thought to be responsible for accelerating electrons to high enough energy to produce the glow discharge in the neutral atmosphere approaching altitudes of nearly 170 kilometers.

The artificial plasma clouds are detected with HF radio soundings and backscatter, ultrahigh frequency (UHF) radar backscatter, and optical imaging systems. Ground measurements of stimulated electromagnetic emissions provide evidence of the strength and frequency for the electrostatic waves that accelerated ambient electrons to ionizing velocities.

The NRL team is working with collaborators at SRI International, University of Alaska Fairbanks, University of Florida, and BAE Systems on this project to synthesize the observations with parametric interactions theory to develop a comprehensive theory of the plasma cloud generation. The next HAARP campaign, scheduled for early 2013, will include experiments to develop denser, more stable ionization clouds.

NASA funds UMass Lowell Research on Space Weather

Professor Paul Song-UMassLowell Space Weather Research

This NASA funded, University of Massachusetts at Lowell research will, “Explore how solar storms affect earth’s atmosphere,” according to an article published on the University’s website.   The article was written by Edwin L. Aguirre.

Professor Paul Song, Director of UMass Lowell’s Center for Atmospheric Research says, “Predicting space weather is the next frontier in weather forecasting.”   Song writes:

“Inclement space weather has increasingly become a threat to modern space technologies and services, such as GPS, shortwave radio and satellite communications.”

Solar storms can interfere with the modern, high powered energy grid that has only been created in this last century on earth.  Song continues:

“The high-energy particles produced by these storms can harm the health of spacewalking astronauts as well as airline passengers and crews flying at high altitudes along polar routes. Geomagnetic storms can also create a surge in electrical current, overloading electric power grids and damaging transmission lines and oil pipelines.”

 

NASA Photo Nov. 5th Shows from Whence Solar Wind Flows

Link to article on Space weather dot com.