3 ms·

The more I have looked into this over the years, the less concern I have in these events being a major issue. There is two things that puts my mind at ease. 1

The more I have looked into this over the years, the less concern I have in these events being a major issue. There is two things that puts my mind at ease. 1. Our electrical infrastructure, while flimsy in some ways is a lot more resilient than we take for granted. It is said the power grid fails in theory but works in practice. But given forward warning, it is possible to shut off or limit the energy flow prior to the event - it will mean voluntary blackouts for a few hours but it is better than a forced blackout for a few months. 2. The forward warning is actually really good now even being up to 2-3 days in advance, just look to any Aurora prediction site, we are all over tracking this stuff. For all the fear of a repeat Carrington event, we would know it is coming and deal with it.

xattt 3y ago
> But given forward warning, it is possible to shut off or limit the energy flow prior to the event - it will mean voluntary blackouts for a few hours but it is better than a forced blackout for a few months. The last few years have shown that leadership in certain areas has Cluster B personality traits, and will do the opposite of good advice just because it feels good to be contrarian.
superkuh 3y ago
We know when CME are coming but we lack any reliable ways to predict how geoeffective they will be. That's mostly a function of the magnetic handedness of the active region it comes from and if it will arrive at earth with their magnetic field in the right orientation (downwards out of the ecliptic plane, -Bz) to efficiently reconnect with the Earth's magnetic field. There's been many a time when some large sequence of strong CME come and everyone expects intense geomagnetic activity but there's no -Bz so it just buffets things for a bit and causes auroral oval effects. Whereas other times some small lone barely CME will arrive with 7 hours of -20nT Bz and causes 45N aurora. What I'm saying is that the people in charge of chosing to shut down parts of the grid are not ever going to get a confident assertion that damage will happen if they don't. There will be enough uncertainty that this kind of pre-emptive action days in advance will not happen. At best we'll get a few hours of time to mitigate when the events arrive at L1 and the solar monitoring spacecraft there like ACE give actual warning.

xattt 3y ago

> But given forward warning, it is possible to shut off or limit the energy flow prior to the event - it will mean voluntary blackouts for a few hours but it is better than a forced blackout for a few months. The last few years have shown that leadership in certain areas has Cluster B personality traits, and will do the opposite of good advice just because it feels good to be contrarian.

superkuh 3y ago

We know when CME are coming but we lack any reliable ways to predict how geoeffective they will be. That's mostly a function of the magnetic handedness of the active region it comes from and if it will arrive at earth with their magnetic field in the right orientation (downwards out of the ecliptic plane, -Bz) to efficiently reconnect with the Earth's magnetic field. There's been many a time when some large sequence of strong CME come and everyone expects intense geomagnetic activity but there's no -Bz so it just buffets things for a bit and causes auroral oval effects. Whereas other times some small lone barely CME will arrive with 7 hours of -20nT Bz and causes 45N aurora. What I'm saying is that the people in charge of chosing to shut down parts of the grid are not ever going to get a confident assertion that damage will happen if they don't. There will be enough uncertainty that this kind of pre-emptive action days in advance will not happen. At best we'll get a few hours of time to mitigate when the events arrive at L1 and the solar monitoring spacecraft there like ACE give actual warning.