
Weather report
Oh, so 100% cloud cover for me on New Year's Eve, then. At least that has been my experience for the last dozen or so CMEs...
A major eruption from the surface of the Sun could give a spectacular display of the aurora borealis in time for New Year's festivities. At 1245 UTC (0445 PT) on 28 December our star belched out a coronal mass ejection from the surface in our direction. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that a …
The latitude by itself is more or less irrelevant; what's important is the distance to the North geomagnetic pole (not the north *magnetic* pole, which moves around much more, and is rather further north right now).
The geomagnetic pole is currently located around Canada's Ellesmere island, at 80N 72W or so. So I am afraid you need to be *a lot* further north in Europe than in North America to see the northern lights.
Feel free to check out http://www.aurora-service.eu/aurora-forecast/ for the gory details.
http://www.aurora-service.eu/aurora-forecast/
According to that site it all happened last night (around midnight weds & the early hours thurs). Anyone see it? Lots of rain here & we're too far south for most of them. In the 30-odd years I've lived here (S Suffolk), I've only seen three.
"Beat me to it!
Lock yer Triffids up tonight."
Under current legislation that is deemed as illegal and can be deemd as racist, offensive to multicellular eukaryotes and possibly specist as they do seem to be part animal.
Bloody Triffids, coming over here and taking the piss, putting nothing back into the community and refusing to integrate.
I think we ought to launch a petition backed by the Sun and if that fails we should defenstrate their greenhouses.
Saunters of left of stage, mumbling and foaming at the mouth about invasive species, Johnny Foreigner and bringing back National Service.
NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center maintains a numbered list of flares, but as yet there's no standard numbering scheme for CMEs, probably because different people and algorithms come up with different determinations what is and isn't a CME. It was easiest from 2007 through 2014, when the twin STEREO spacecraft added viewpoints to the old, traditional one along the Sun-Earth line (the SOHO spacecraft, now 20 years old). One of the STEREO spacecraft is now "lost," at least temporarily, so the determination of CME origin location and direction of propagation is somewhat degraded.
"That was one of the reasons given by the UK and Ireland Met services for the recent naming of storms in the region"
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All well and good but what does one have to fear from a storm called Frank, Abigail or Barney? Surely one should give a big storm some form of name that would instil fear into the masses such as;
Nebuchadnezzar smiter of gardens.
Ajax slayer of cattle.
Agamemnon daughter killer.
Boudica of the fiery hair, despoiler of Essex.
Abigail cleaner of fireplaces does not cut the mustard in my book and as for Frank? who has ever been frightened by a Frank other than the lovely Mr Bruno?
About the Carrignton event smokin' a lot of hardware and starting some fires. Well thems was the bad ol' days of cloth and paper insulation. Now a'days almost every piece of equipment is on a spike supressing power strip, plus whatever OVP the power companies have on board. So I don't see a G5 event causing permanent damage on a very large scale. Certanly not on a dogs-n-cats living together scale.
Not that people 100+ years in the future won't look back and think us primative in their eyes.
You're no doubt right about electromagnetic pulse-like events, but CMEs with strong magnetic field oriented opposite to the earth's can lead to induced currents in the earth and oceans ("geomagnetically induced currents"), and without sufficient warning, MWatt transformers can't have their ground phase adjusted in time. Sufficient warning being the 1 - 3 days provided by coronagraphs; without them, something as fast as the Carrington event would allow only 10 - 15 minutes of warning when it passed by our sentinels near L1.... or seconds when it passed by geosynchronous orbit. You can't change the ground phase of that size transformers that fast, so you need to yank them off the grid or watch the oil baths they spin in burst into flames.
Well, you're wrong. CMEs in 1989 led to the destruction of an HV transformer in New Jersey, and the collapse of the Quebec power grid (90 seconds from normal functioning to a full system failure).
Surge protectors provide microsecond-long absorption of high voltages, not the quasi-static huge currents that are induced by CMEs. Thinking that surge protectors would help is like thinking that a waterproof jacket would help stop your house flooding.
Yes and of course, all those early warning satellites have anti-CME missiles built in, so if a biggie hits us, those satellites will keep our delicate electronics safe.
*Tip: If those satellites can survive the CME, then build everything out of the same bleeding stuff you NASA numpties...
*Joke!!!
It's been clear skies here for weeks. But get one little slightly interesting astronomical event, and the clouds form up in seconds.
Mind you, being this close to the Equator, probably wouldn't have seen sod all anyway. More likely that we'll see the lights of the firework display in Dubai
https://youtu.be/mxPzjsyspEc
There seems to have happened a little hickup in Amazon's "govcloud":
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3yv2db/aws_ebs_volume_data_loss_usgovcloudwest1a/
It looks like those people who believe that "made to government-standard" means more expensive and less reliable - they were actually right ;-)
Dutch "consumers" will between midnight 31/12 and 1 o'clock ignite on a buildup area of 2300 km² a large part of their fireworks on which they spend some 70 million Euros. That is except more than 45000 kilograms of fireworks confiscated by the national police force as illegal (like avalance mortars).
I recall the main risk not just being the destruction of hundreds of very hard-to-replace transformers, but the widespread nuclear meltdowns caused by the various reactors throughout Europe and the Americas running out of diesel for the emergency backup generators.
Also there are a lot of very dangerous chemical plants containing toxins like pressurized ammonia and chlorine which if their containment systems go down could create a serious problem.
Sources: "Horizon: What If We All Disappeared"