George B
Extinct but not forgotten Staff Member
Solar Maximum Doom . . . hype or real????
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27ji-NL2Pb4&feature=youtube_gdata_player
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Solar Shield--Protecting the North American Power Grid
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/26oct_solarshield/
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27ji-NL2Pb4&feature=youtube_gdata_player
http://www.space.com/10906-space-storms-threat.htmlU.S. Must Take Space Storm Threat Seriously, Experts Warn
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/10mar_stormwarning/"A severe solar storm has the potential to take down telecommunications and power grids, and the country needs to work on being better prepared, said NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Lubchenco is also the U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere."
"The space weather threat is becoming more dire as our sun ramps up toward its period of solar maximum, predicted for around 2013. Activity on the sun fluctuates on a roughly 11-year cycle, and our star has been relatively dormant for a while."
"It is slightly scary, and I think properly so," said John Beddington, the U.K. government's chief scientific adviser. "We've got to be scared by these events otherwise we will not take them seriously."
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March 10, 2006:"This week researchers announced that a storm is coming--the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one," she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic
Solar Max of 1958."
"History shows that big sunspot cycles 'ramp up' faster than small ones," he says. "I expect to see the first sunspots of the next cycle appear in late 2006 or 2007—and Solar Max to be underway by 2010 or 2011."
Who's right? Time will tell. Either way, a storm is coming.
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Solar Shield--Protecting the North American Power Grid
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/26oct_solarshield/
--------Oct. 26, 2010: Every hundred years or so, a solar storm comes along so potent it fills the skies of Earth with blood-red auroras, makes compass needles point in the wrong direction, and sends electric currents coursing through the planet's topsoil. The most famous such storm, the Carrington Event of 1859, actually shocked telegraph operators and set some of their offices on fire. A 2008 report by the National Academy of Sciences warns that if such a storm occurred today, we could experience widespread power blackouts with permanent damage to many key transformers.
"Solar Shield is a new and experimental forecasting system for the North American power grid," explains project leader Antti Pulkkinen, a Catholic University of America research associate working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "We believe we can zero in on specific transformers and predict which of them are going to be hit hardest by a space weather event."
While the CME is crossing the sun-Earth divide, a trip that typically takes 24 to 48 hours, the Solar Shield team prepares to calculate ground currents. "We work at Goddard's Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC)," says Pulkkinen. The CCMC is a place where leading researchers from around the world have gathered their best physics-based computer programs for modeling space weather events. The crucial moment comes about 30 minutes before impact when the cloud sweeps past ACE, a spacecraft stationed 1.5 million km upstream from Earth. Sensors onboard ACE make in situ measurements of the CME's speed, density, and magnetic field. These data are transmitted to Earth and the waiting Solar Shield team.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4008700...-solar-shield-protect-power-grids-sun-storms/A 2008 workshop by the National Research Councils Space Studies Board predicted that a "severe geomagnetic storm scenario" would have societal and economic costs of up to $2 trillion in the first year alone, and recovery time ranging from four to 10 years.
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http://www.space.com/9484-nasa-solar-shield-protect-power-grids-sun-storms.htmlNASA's Solar Shield to Protect Power Grids From Sun Storms
by Nola Redd, SPACE.com ContributorDate: 08 November 2010 Time: 07:05 AM ET
Pulkkinen said the Solar Shield project is still in the experimental stage and more data ? meaning more solar activity observations ? will be needed to refine it. But he hopes that more individual power companies will be able to turn to the EPRI to receive both forecasts and real-time information for the approaching storm.
Each node could then take the action it deems appropriate, based on localized predictions, NASA, he added. ?
These actions could include simple things such as canceling planned maintenance work or having more employees on hand to deal with resulting surges, or stronger tactics like disconnecting the most vulnerable transformers from the grid itself. Such a controlled power outage only would be temporary, and far less damaging than an externally induced blackout.