The Great Solar Storm of 2012?

By Kennedy Maize

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The 2009 blockbuster movie 2012 about a global cataclysm combined Hollywood special effects with supposed predictions by Nostradamus; a Mayan calendar that ends on December 21, 2012; and a very rare planetary alignment that supposedly occurs on the same day. Hollywood producers seldom let technical accuracy get in the way of a good story, but suppose, this one time, the story has an element of truth.

The event begins with a giant thermonuclear explosion on the sun. The fusion of hydrogen atoms swells up and bursts open on the sun’s surface, spewing a stew of radiation and gas particles trapped in the solar wind. The continuous but variable flow of particles and magnetic fields from the sun creates gusts that can quickly reach Earth. Within hours, a space storm, a “coronal mass ejection” (CME), accompanied by a beautiful aurora borealis or “northern lights” display of shimmering celestial curtains, bombards Earth with geomagnetic disturbances.

The consequences are dramatic: disruptions to communications satellites, interference with global positioning systems (GPS) and air traffic control, and, most telling, taking down the high-voltage electric transmission system over wide swaths of the planet, blacking out more than 130 million people in the U.S. alone. Secondary effects due to the loss of the grid involve water system failures, severe disruptions to natural gas pipelines, factories shut down for weeks or months, food rotting in unrefrigerated warehouses, and unquantifiable costs to the world economy.

The cost of damage to the U.S. totals $1 trillion to $2 trillion. More than 300 grounded electrical high-voltage transformers in the U.S. suffer damages so serious that they need to be replaced, putting intolerable strain on an already stressed supply chain. Recovery takes as much as a decade, as the results wreck havoc with the U.S. and world infrastructure and economy.

“This is not science fiction. It is fact,” says Joe McClelland, director of the office of emergency response at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). It has happened before, he points out, but with far less severe economic consequences. It is likely to happen again and, according to space scientists, it could happen in the next few years, as a period of unusually calm solar weather reverses, picks up energy, and gets nasty. Many predictions suggest that the “big one” could come this year or next.

Solar Storms Could Strengthen

The effects of solar storms have been the subject of numerous recent studies and analyses, including sophisticated computer simulations, funded by the electric industry and the government. There is much studying of once and future geomagnetic storms and what to do about them. It isn’t clear that these studies, serious as they have been, will offer any concrete protections to the electric infrastructure in the event of a large solar geomagnetic storm. Predicting solar storms appears to be, in the reckoning of one industry veteran, “a crap shoot.”

By many indications, our globe may be entering a period of greatly increased jeopardy from solar attacks. Solar activity, as astronomers have known for centuries, follows a roughly 11-year cycle, heralded by visible disturbances on the surface of the sun, known as sun spots (Figure 1). Sun spot activity shows that today the sun is at the end of a rather extended period of little activity, a “solar minimum.”

1. Stormy weather coming. The cyclical nature of the number of sunspots is predictive of the severity and number of expected solar storms—more sunspots mean more solar storms of increasing intensity. Data collected through November 2010 are shown, with predicted values in red. According to the Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Panel, the minimum of the current 11-year cycle occurred in December 2008. Source: NOAA

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) physicist Douglas Biesecker noted an increase in sunspot activity in early 2008, which he described “as like the first robin of spring. In this case, it’s an early omen of solar storms that will gradually increase over the next few years.”

The fear shared by scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and NOAA is that our planet could be entering a particularly vicious “solar maximum.” The sidebar describes the various satellites that are keeping an eye on the sun.

Space Weather Watchers

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) manages the Space Weather Prediction Center as part of the National Weather Service and has a separate website (http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/elecpower/) that provides electric utilities with alerts and space weather forecasts. Although the center uses data from multiple satellites—including ACE and STEREO, described below—NOAA is unable to provide predictions fast enough that they would be useful to the power industry, according to industry officials.

NASA also attempts to provide space weather forecasts. Several space satellites that are managed by NASA watch Earth’s sun, attempting to learn about the little-understood phenomena of solar eruptions and solar storms. One goal is to provide warning of potentially catastrophic storms with enough lead time that humans can take preventive action.

Four primary satellites continuously watch the sun and report myriad data daily. In general, each satellite is purpose-built to collect particular data. The data collected by each satellite, including photographs and videos, are reported daily on web pages accessible by the public.

SOHO

The oldest sun-gazing satellite, launched in 1995, is SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. It was developed jointly by the European Space Agency and NASA and is flown by NASA out of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, near Washington, D.C. This satellite moves around the sun in a dance step with Earth at the L1 Legrangian Point. According to a NASA fact sheet, the combined gravity of Earth and the sun keeps the satellite locked in a direct line between the sun and our planet, about 1.5 million kilometers (km) away, providing an uninterrupted view of the ultimate source of all Earth’s energy (Figure 2).

2. Eye in the sky. The SOHO satellite was launched, according to NASA, to “study the sun from its deep core to the outer corona and the solar wind.” The satellite, launched in 1995, weighs about 2 tons and is about 25 feet across. Source: NASA

SOHO tries to answer three fundamental questions about the sun: What are the structure and dynamics of the sun’s interior? Why is there a solar corona, or halo, and how is it heated to temperatures of about 1 million degrees C? Where does the solar wind come from, and how does it accelerate?

ACE

Launched in 1997, NASA’s ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) satellite provides real-time data used in NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center for forecasts and warnings of solar storms. It, too, operates some 1.5 million km from Earth near the L1 point and is equipped to stay in orbit until 2024. Goddard also flies the ACE craft.

ACE features an array of equipment that includes a cosmic ray isotope spectrometer to determine the chemical isotopes that make up galactic cosmic rays; two spectrometers, each tuned for a different set of measurements, to analyze the chemical composition of the solar wind and intersteller matter; an ultra-low-energy isotope spectrometer to measure ion flux; electron, proton, and alpha particle monitors; and a magnetometer.

STEREO

Launched in 2006, NASA’s STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) provides a three-dimensional look at solar phenomena. Two nearly identical observatories—one ahead of Earth in its orbit and the other trailing behind—trace the flow of energy and matter from the sun to Earth. They reveal the 3-D structure of coronal mass ejections, the violent eruptions of matter from the sun that can disrupt satellites and power grids.

Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory outside Washington, D.C., built and operates STEREO. According to a Johns Hopkins fact sheet, each of the observatories is about the size of a large wooden desk and has solar photovoltaic power arrays about the length of a large school bus (Figure 3). Data from the twin observatories “will allow scientists to track the buildup and liftoff of magnetic energy from the Sun and the trajectory of Earth-bound coronal mass ejections in 3D,” says the Baltimore-based university.

3. Visualizing solar storms. STEREO captures a mosaic of ultraviolet images in different wavelengths and can then combine them into a single 3-D figure, as shown. Each wavelength allows scientists to study different feature of the sun. If you have a pair of 3-D glasses, you may want to watch a 3-D video of the sun prepared using STEREO images. Go to www.nasa.gov and search on “STEREO”. Source: NASA

NASA has an iPhone app, 3D Sun, that uses STEREO data to allow users to rotate our home star, zoom in on active regions, and monitor solar activity. It is available from the Apple app store or from http://3dsun.org.

AMPERE

Last August, the Johns Hopkins physics lab, Boeing Co. and Iridium Communications announced a new system that uses commercial satellites to monitor solar activity. In a world of snazzy acronyms, this system is known as AMPERE, for Active Magnetosphere and Planetary Electrodynamics Response Experiment. The system is said to provide real-time magnetic field measurements to forecast space weather with data gathered from the new instruments mounted on Iridium’s fleet of commercial communications satellites. The project is funded by a $4 million National Science Foundation grant. A press release claims, “This is the first step in developing a system that enables 24-hour tracking of Earth’s response to supersonic blasts of plasma ejected from the Sun at collection rates fast enough to one day enable forecasters to predict space weather effects.”

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