A predictable, cyclical, celestial event could strike the Earth this year or next, possibly eclipsing climate change, Ukraine, or the upcoming presidential campaign for damage and drama, at least in the short term. The scientific moniker is “coronal mass ejections” or, predictably, CMEs. For laymen, call it “solar flares” or “solar storms.” In our acronym-addicted world, these “geomagnetic disturbances” are also called “GMDs.”
Every 11 years or so, that lucky old sun has something to do other than roll around heaven all day. Everyday sunspot activity, dark spots visible on the surface of the sun, for unknown reasons over time develop an attitude, grow and explode, sending plasma and charged fields into space. The periodic phenomenon is known as a “solar maximum.” It also coincides with widespread visibility of the aurora borealis, or “northern lights,” usually confined to northern latitudes.
The federal government’s joint NASA-NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center describes CMEs as “large expulsions of plasma and magnetic field from the Sun’s corona. They can eject billions of tons of coronal material and carry an embedded magnetic field (frozen in flux) that is stronger than the background solar wind interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) strength. CMEs travel outward from the Sun at speeds ranging from slower than 250 kilometers per second (km/s) to as fast as near 3000 km/s. The fastest Earth-directed CMEs can reach our planet in as little as 15-18 hours. Slower CMEs can take several days to arrive. They expand in size as they propagate away from the Sun and larger CMEs can reach a size comprising nearly a quarter of the space between Earth and the Sun by the time it reaches our planet.”
CMEs can knock out global positioning systems, interfere with high-frequency radio and satellite communications, and disrupt and damage electric transmission systems. It happened in the U.S. and Canada 34 years ago in 1989. Early that year (March 10) a solar storm—not a particularly severe event by historical records—erupted, creating a gust in the solar wind that reached northern Canada in a matter of days. The arrival of the solar particles caused severe disturbances in the planet’s magnetic field. That was the beginning.
Here’s how NASA described it: “It was like the energy of thousands of nuclear bombs exploding at the same time. The storm cloud rushed out from the sun, straight towards Earth, at a million miles an hour. The solar flare that accompanied the outburst immediately caused short-wave radio interference, including the jamming of radio signals from Radio Free Europe into Russia. It was thought that the signals had been jammed by the Kremlin, but it was only the sun acting up!”
On March 13, according to the North American Electric Reliability Council, the robust 750-KV Hydro-Quebec transmission system “collapsed in seconds,” taking nine hours to restore. Across the H-Q system, two step-up transformers, thyristor and capacitor banks at several units, and static VAR compensators across the system that were damaged or destroyed.
A thousand miles away the solar storm induced a current on PJM’s 500-KV line serving the two-unit, 2,300-MW Salem nuclear plant. The induced current damaged Unit 1’s step-up transformer, creating “large melted masses of copper and copper shot.” The winding in the transformer confined the damage and the plant did not trip off. Engineers found the damage after the solar storm, and the transformer had to be replaced at a cost of millions of 1989 dollars.
The last solar storm episode was in 2012. It was a dud. But there is some evidence that this cycle of CMEs could be a boomer. Scientific American reported last week (July 18), “The sun is producing fireworks—letting off a trio of solar flares in just two hours….” One of those flares was a coronal mass ejection. The same day Axios wrote that scientific predictions are that current activity could peak in 2024 and could be more extreme than the last solar maximum.
The Electric Power Research Institute reported that last February “An active sunspot region unleashed several solar flares, and multiple coronal mass ejections (CMEs) with Earth-directed components from the sun, on February 24–25, 2023. The leading edge of these CMEs arrived at Earth at approximately 19:25 UT on February 26, 2023.” EPRI added, “The geomagnetic disturbance (GMD) event was categorized as a Kp-7 (where Kp-9 is the maximum); no significant impact on the North American bulk-power system has been reported to date.”
Solar storms have no doubt been occurring for billions of years. On Earth, they burst, literally, into prominence only in the mid-19th Century as modern electric technology began to develop and spread. In August 1859, amateur astronomer Richard Carrington was, along with other astronomers around the world, watching the number of spots on the solar disc growing, according to a 2022 account in Space.com. While sketching the phenomena on Sept. 1, Carrington was temporarily blinded by a spectacular flare from the sun.
Within hours, telegraph systems in England and elsewhere went haywire and the northern lights became visible in the tropics. The current carried down the telegraph lines even ignited the paper telegraphers used to translate messages from code to alphabetic characters. Carrington hypothesized correctly that the solar explosion he experienced caused the geomagnetic disturbance. The 1859 solar storm is now known as the “Carrington event.”
“When you see a big sunspot, what’s the chance that it’s going to erupt and give us a big solar flare and coronal mass ejection? We don’t understand the factors that go into what makes it release its energy.” NASA scientist Alex Young
What do we know about the causes and formation of CMEs? NASA scientist Alex Young told Axios, “When you see a big sunspot, what’s the chance that it’s going to erupt and give us a big solar flare and coronal mass ejection? We don’t understand the factors that go into what makes it release its energy.”
The U.S. for decades has deployed satellites to detect and monitor and solar activity. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), which NASA and the European Space Agency launched in 1995, is locked in a direct line with the sun, tracking solar activity including CMEs. NASA’s 2006 STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory), run by the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, provides a three-dimensional look at solar phenomena. Two nearly identical observatories—one ahead of Earth in its orbit and the other trailing behind— reveal the structure of coronal mass ejections.
NASA’s 2015 Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) is the primary indicator of the arrival of a solar storm, which NASA says “can often provide 15 to 60 minutes advanced warning of shock arrival at Earth – and any possible sudden impulse or sudden storm commencement; as registered by Earth-based magnetometers.”
According to industry experts, this warning is not sufficient to allow electrical systems to shut down major equipment and systems in time to avoid colliding with the storm. So, attention has focused on shortening the time and cost to recover from the potential damage a CME could induce, particularly to large power transformers. In 2012-2013, the Department of Homeland Security developed and demonstrated a prototype “recovery transformer,” and issued a 2014 final report on the project. DHS said its prototype transformers could be transported, installed, and energized “in less than six days as compared to two months or more using conventional methods.”
Some analysts called for developing a strategic transformer reserve, a population of the recovery transformers along with the transportation infrastructure and staff to install them. After a flurry of activity seven or eight years ago, the issue has largely disappeared.
–Kennedy Maize
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