Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared the Washington Post’s speculation about the possibility of a gigantic solar storm leaving millions without phone or internet access and requiring months or years of reconstruction:
A storm large enough to cause such widespread effects is unlikely to occur in any given year. And the severity of these impacts will depend on many factors, including the state of our planet’s magnetic field that day. But it’s almost certain that some form of this catastrophe will occur one day, says Ian Cohen, a senior scientist who studies heliophysics at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
Long-time Slashdot reader davidwr remains skeptical. “I have only heard of two major events in the last 1,300 years, one estimated between 744 and 993 ADand the other being the Carrington Event of 1859.
But efforts are being made to improve our preparedness, reports the Washington Post:
To anticipate this threat, a federation of U.S. and international government agencies, along with hundreds of scientists affiliated with those organizations, began working on how to make predictions about what our Sun might do. And a small but growing group of scientists say artificial intelligence will be a critical part of efforts to warn us in advance of such a storm…
Currently, no warning system is capable of warning us more than a few hours before a devastating solar storm. If it moves quickly enough, it could take as little as 15 minutes. The most useful sentinel – a sun-orbiting satellite launched by the United States in 2015 – is much closer to Earth than the sun, so that by the time a fast-moving storm crosses its path, an hour or so less is enough to warn us. . The European Space Agency has proposed a system to provide earlier warning by placing a satellite called Vigil in orbit around the Sun, positioned approximately the same distance from Earth as Earth is from the Sun. This could potentially give us up to five hours of warning of an approaching solar storm, enough time to do the one essential thing that can help preserve electronic devices: turn them all off.
But what if there was a way to better predict this, by analyzing the data we have? That’s the idea behind a new AI-based model recently unveiled by scientists at the Frontier Development Lab, a public-private partnership that includes NASA, the US Geological Survey and the US Department of Energy. The model uses deep learning, a type of AI, to examine solar wind flow, the usually calm flow of particles that escape our sun and pass through the solar system well beyond Pluto’s orbit . Using observations of this solar wind, the model can predict the “geomagnetic disturbance” that an impending solar storm observed by satellites orbiting the sun would cause at any given point on Earth, say the researchers involved. This model can predict the magnitude of the flux of the Earth’s magnetic field when the solar storm arrives, and therefore the magnitude of induced currents in power lines and underwater internet cables…
The first primitive ancestor of future AI-based solar weather warning systems is already operational. The DstLive system, which debuted on the web in December 2022, uses machine learning to collect data on the state of the Earth’s magnetic field and solar wind and translate it into a single measurement for the entire planet, known under the name DST. Think of it like the Richter scale, but for solar storms. This figure is intended to give us an idea of the intensity of a storm’s impact on land, one hour to six hours in advance.
Unfortunately, we may not know how useful such systems are until we live through a major solar storm.
