Large magnetic solar storms can interfere with technologies such as GPS and utility grids, but a new tool could help predict these events over 24 hours before they occur.
Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) can also damage satellites and disrupt radio transmissions, and in the past have caused airplanes to delay their landing for up to an hour, Imperial College London reported. Not all CMEs cause these problems, and the amount of effect they have on Earth is based on the orientation of the magnetic fields within the ejection.
Current satellites can only determine the orientation of a mass ejection when it is between 60 and 30 minutes away, but this newly developed technology could allow for over 24 hours' notice.
"As we become more entwined with technology, disruption from large space weather events affects our daily lives more and more," said Neel Savani, an alumnus and Visiting Researcher at Imperial College London and a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "Breaking through that 24 hour barrier to prediction is crucial for dealing efficiently with any potential problems before they arise."
The orientation of a CME's magnetic fields is determined by their initial form as they erupt from the Sun as well as how they evolve as the hurtle towards Earth. These ejections originate at two points on the Sun and form a "croissant-shaped cloud" before being launched into space. The cloud is filled with twisted magnetic fields, and if one of these fields hits Earth's own magnetic field it "opens a door" to let solar material into the atmosphere, resulting in a geomagnetic storm.
Past prediction methods have primarily relied on measurements taken at the time of the CMEs eruption from the Sun, but this new technology uses a ranger of observatories to track its evolution as it approaches Earth.
The model has been tested on eight previous CMEs, and appears to have the ability to improve solar storm predictions. If further NASA testing makes the same findings, the method could be used by the NOAA and Met Office to predict these potentially-harmful solar storms.
The developments were published in a recent edition of the journal Space Weather.
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