NASA warns of potential blackouts across Earth due to solar flares erupting on the sun
- NASA warns that solar flares and storms erupting on the sun in May 2024 can disrupt Earth's communications, power grids, and satellites globally.
- These warnings come amid the sun's peak activity cycle, which includes powerful X-class flares such as the X2.7 event on May 14, though recent outages in Spain were unrelated to solar activity.
- Experts attribute Spain's May 20 mobile outage to a technical fault during a Telefonica network upgrade and April power outages to multiple factors like poor grid management, not to geomagnetic storms.
- Solar physicist Pål Brekke clarified that recent widespread power failures in Spain were not due to space weather, emphasizing that intense solar storms typically have a greater impact on power systems located further north.
- A recent U.S. Government exercise highlighted limited warning times, around 30 minutes, before severe solar storms strike, stressing the need for enhanced monitoring and public awareness of space weather threats.
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68 Articles
Emergency Drill Reveals U.S. Government's "Cosmic Blindspot" with Sobering Vulnerabilities to Solar Storms
Welcome to this week’s Intelligence Brief… Recently, an after-action report on the U.S. government’s readiness in the face of potential threats from space has revealed concerns about our vulnerability to severe solar storms. In our analysis, we’ll be looking at 1) how a training exercise conducted last year reveals how federal agencies and technological infrastructure might be impacted in the aftermath of cosmic events, 2) how the data reveals m…
How space weather impacts us: A look at some of the worst solar storms in history
Forecasters of space weather keep an eye on the sun to stay ahead of eruptions of solar material that have the ability to shut down power grids on Earth, disrupt aircraft routes, global communications and GPS, and damage satellites and spacecraft. Here are some of the worst solar storms Earth has weathered.
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