157 Years Ago

The Carrington Event began.

The cornonal-mass ejection hit the Earth square-on. The resultant auroras, what we often refer to as "northern lights", were visible almost to the Equator. The storm energized telegraph systems and caused small fires.

I don't know what would happen if one hit us now. There's been periodic attention paid to hardening the electrical grid, especially for a time after the 1989 solar storm. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued regulations two years ago, but there's debate if they were strong enough.

Space Weather

Two solar observation satellites are now in position.

Space Weather and Airline Flights

NPR had a story last night about the burgeoning number of polar airline flights and teh impact of space weather.

Airlines are paying extra attention to the weather these days: the weather in space.

That's because more commercial flights are using shortcuts that take them near the North Pole or the South Pole. And in polar regions, flights are vulnerable to cosmic storms that can interfere with communication and navigation systems, or even expose travelers to worrisome doses of radiation.

Time was that there were very few polar flights. TWA had one of the few scheduled flights, flying Lockheed Constellations from San Francisco to London. Going over the Pole in those days meant that the flight crew included a navigator who was skilled in celestial navigation. Now GPS is used, but GPS can be knocked out by a solar flare and airliners no longer have little ports in the roof of the flight desk for a navigator's sextant.

Getting caught over one of the poles during a solar flare would be a very bad thing.

(H/T)