4 ms·
I don't think there have been any tremendous, relevant innovations in solar monitoring in a very long time. But (as with many other 10/100/1000 year events) we
by swatcoder 3y ago
I don't think there have been any tremendous, relevant innovations in solar monitoring in a very long time.
But (as with many other 10/100/1000 year events) we have been agressively positioning ourselves to be far more vulnerable to catastrophic impact.
If contemporary society were written in Rust, quite a lot of it would be tagged "unsafe" for lack of wanting to deal with troublesome edge cases.
- ianburrell 3y agoThere are now multiple satellites pointing at the Sun providing real-time updates. The image in the article is from SDO, Solar Dynamic Observatory. They are connected to sophisticated models predicting the Sun's weather. They can predict the direction and size of flares.
- swatcoder 3y agoSure, and does that materially change our ability to foresee or record the sort of large Earth-facing events we're discussing? The point is that for events of this class, we're not just "testing more often" as the person I replied to suggested. We do collect more data and can make more sophisticated models from that data, but the big stuff is a bit like seeing a thundercloud on the horizon and hasn't materially changed for all that tech.
- ianburrell 3y agoWe can predict with difficult if sunspots are going to produce flares, we can detect flares, and we can predict which direction they are going. We couldn't do any that decades ago. For thunderstorms on the horizon, we have tornado warnings. We also know if the thunderstorms belong to a hurricane since we can track them and somewhat predict their track.