How coming solar storms could cripple economy

The Toronto Star:

Severe solar weather could knock out electrical and satellite communication infrastructure on Earth in 2012 or 2013, according to a NASA scientist who is director of the space agency’s Heliophysics division.

The calculation – albeit imprecise – of when the solar storms will hit is based on the magnetic cycle of the sun as it waxes and wanes over 22 years, said Dr. Richard Fisher. During those 22 years sun spots or solar flares ebb and flow over an 11-year period. The next peak in those sun spots is expected to be around 2013 or 2012.

“We don’t have a physical theory that lets us predict how severe or the magnitude of how strong this peak will be,” he explained in an interview with the Star. Or even when exactly it will strike.

But when it comes, it could have serious effects – potentially disabling our worldwide telecommunication, electrical, commercial airline, shipping and navigation systems.

In an article on the NASA website Fisher describes the sun as “waking up from a deep slumber and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms.”

The consequences of these solar weather episodes — known in the scientific literature as coronal mass ejections or solar flares or solar particle events — have become more profound and more apparent as society has developed technology, Fisher said.

During the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Middle Ages the solar flares did not affect much. With the development of technology and the use of electricity and electrical power solar flares and solar magnetic activity began to have an impact on the earth and society.

Solar magnetic activity has an impact on the earth’s ionosphere — or the charged part of the earth’s atmosphere. And those changes can knock out radio communication, smart power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, electrical power, hospitals and financial networks.

According to the National Academy of Sciences a “century-class” solar storm — a very rare extreme solar storm — could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina.

The intercontinental power transmission grid could potentially be crippled by intense sun activity. Flare events send up big waves of charge particles that occasionally create a pulse in the electrical transmission lines, Fisher said. The result is a burn out, with power down for hours, maybe even days.

This happened in March, 1989 during a Quebec power outage which was caused by a geomagnetic storm which caused a the Hydro-Québec power failure which left 6 million people in the Canadian province of Quebec without power for 9 or more hours. A similar event happened in South Africa during the last solar cycle, he said.

Scientists are now looking at ways to study solar activity more closely and fine tune a way of predicting them so steps can be taken to perhaps alleviate any serious damage.

A Space Weather Enterprise Forum has been meeting for the past four years to examine the impact of space weather and look at possible ways to protect the public.

Already some sectors take steps to avoid any problems from solar storms. Fisher points to the commercial shipping and oil exploration business that often cease work or travel when the sun is active and the ionosphere is charging because of the fear that errors in their navigation systems will occur due to sun activity. And commercial airlines – which make about 10,000 transpolar flights a year – often choose to reroute planes away from the North Pole during active solar periods.

“We need to plan and understand the nature of the threat,” he said. “It’s a public policy issue.”

“We do have a societal infrastructure that extends up to space. We have satellite communications. We have GPS. When we have connections with space we’re into the realm of the sun. That’s the driver out there.”