01-30-2012, 05:09 PM
A much stronger X class CME just hit us within the past couple hours.
I swear it seems like the Earth's magnetic field is getting weaker, because they saw aurora's here in Arizona(higher altitude and much darker away from city lights), which is completely unheard of. <Evidence> In fact, I just looked at this aurora guide
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/Aurora/ which doesn't even list Arizona anywhere on the list.
This was caused by the moderately strong m.9 class flare from my previous post (we are still in the previously mentioned radiation storm although its been only S1 out of a scale up to S5). This new one was X2, quite a bit stronger. I wonder what kind of effects this one will have.
Looking historically, at around the same time in the solar 10-12 year sunspot / solar flare cycles, there was a very strong X6, which "..triggered a category S3 radiation storm.". This was nicknamed the Bastille Day event This much more recent S3 radiation storm we had was caused by a much weaker CME. I'm not sure what this means, if anything, but I find it quite interesting. I wonder if our magnetic field / ionosphere is significantly weakened since then, and what an X5+ CME would do to us now.
I swear it seems like the Earth's magnetic field is getting weaker, because they saw aurora's here in Arizona(higher altitude and much darker away from city lights), which is completely unheard of. <Evidence> In fact, I just looked at this aurora guide
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/Aurora/ which doesn't even list Arizona anywhere on the list.
This was caused by the moderately strong m.9 class flare from my previous post (we are still in the previously mentioned radiation storm although its been only S1 out of a scale up to S5). This new one was X2, quite a bit stronger. I wonder what kind of effects this one will have.
Looking historically, at around the same time in the solar 10-12 year sunspot / solar flare cycles, there was a very strong X6, which "..triggered a category S3 radiation storm.". This was nicknamed the Bastille Day event This much more recent S3 radiation storm we had was caused by a much weaker CME. I'm not sure what this means, if anything, but I find it quite interesting. I wonder if our magnetic field / ionosphere is significantly weakened since then, and what an X5+ CME would do to us now.