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NOAA 30 min forecast UPDATE Friday: –– For readers in darkness, there is currently a G4 geomagnetic storm. Satellites at L1 suggest a spike in density (SWEPAM) coming through in minutes (5.30pm WST 8.30pm EDT). See Glendale for live reports of where the action is. Graphs and discussion at SpaceWeatherlive. Nullschool-Space (a very low resolution, generic estimate) is as colorful as it gets. This post is temporarily bumped. 8.6 out of 10 based on 18 ratings Ben Davidson speaks from Spaceweathernews.com and claims that there was a short sharp geomagnetic storm over the East Coast of Australia around the time the Queensland Callide Power plant exploded. The CME that flew past Earth didn’t do much around the world, causing a small 1% deviation in magnetometers. But there was a burst of activity in the Southern Hemisphere that appears to have hit the east coast of Australia. Magnetometers there saw a 300 – 500% change* between noon and 3pm on the same day as the Callide Coal Power Plant blew up. The explosion happened at 1.44pm and the 275 kV transmission lines tripped at 2:06pm. *(UPDATE: There is some contention in comments about the Australian DST figures — we’re they really that high or unusual? I’ll update the post when I can confirm it either way). We don’t know if this tipped something over the edge at Callide, but the timing is highly coincidental. If Earth’s magnetic field is weakening it would seem urgent, to say the least, to understand the risks these spaceweather events pose to our critical infrastructure. Perhaps an engineer who knows the design of (hydrogen cooled) supercritical coal reactors might be able […] May 29th, 2021 | Tags: Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), Geomagnetic | Category: Astronomy, Geology, Geomagnetic, Global Warming, Grids, Spaceweather |  Print This Post | | Our understanding of the sun’s effect of Earth’s weather is so immature Remarkably, some Japanese families kept weather record diaries in the 1700 and 1800s, and some for as long as 150 years. The connections they reveal are tantalizing but so incomplete. We are trying to fish out primitive signals from murky water. The Sun turns around on itself every 27 days, so these researchers are looking for repeating patterns in lightning that fit, but the poles of the sun spin slower than the equator and the sun spots can take their own time. Hence, it’s not a neat “27” days. During periods of high solar activity, they found regular peaks in lightning activity with the right timing, from May to September when the cold Siberian air mass is not so influential. Other studies we’ve discussed here have investigated long solar cycles on the 11 year or 200 year scales. But here, the researchers are thinking of day to day weather, and looking for a solar influence on timeframe that might improve weather forecasting. Obviously there is a long way to go. As for mechanisms they suspect that it’s the solar wind that is influential, but they don’t know, when […] July 19th, 2018 | Tags: Japan, Lightning, Solar Amplification | Category: Global Warming, Spaceweather, The Sun | Print This Post | | A new study by Steinke shows that the sun could have been a driver (somehow) of some of the monsoonal rain changes over the last 6,000 years over Indonesia and Northern Australia. h/t to The Hockey Schtick In the spirit of the Perfect ClimateTM that existed prior to Henry Ford, we also find that Indonesia had a dry spell that lasted for a while, like say, 3,000 years. It ended about 800BC whereupon things got wetter, and mostly stayed wetter. The authors (Steinke et al) think this might have something to do with solar minima which was very low 2800 years ago. (Though I note the Greek Dark Ages also finished then, and “city states” arose, right, so it could have been that too. Ahem?) To get straight to the action in Figure 6 the top squiggly line is AISM Rainfall (that’s the Australian-Indonesian summer monsoon). It shows how things were wetter in the last 2800 years ago and drier before that (annoyingly, the present time is on the left). The second part of the graph in red shows sunspot numbers. That gets flipped upside down and superimposed on the rainfall graph in the third part, and we can see […] May 8th, 2014 | Tags: Australian rainfall, Evidence, Floods, Rain, Solar Amplification | Category: Global Warming, Science, Spaceweather, The Sun | Print This Post | | A team of researchers looked at the solar influence on Southern Hemisphere Westerly Winds (SWW). These winds influence rainfall patterns and ocean currents in the Southern Hemisphere. Varma et al infer rainfall patterns by looking at iron deposits in marine sediments near Chile, which are apparently higher during drier conditions and lower during wetter times. They compared these to both Beryllium (10Be) and Carbon-14 (14C) which they use to estimate solar activity. The end result is they find that the westerly winds shift northwards towards the equator during lower solar activity, and conversely move southwards towards the poles during higher solar activity. The shifting wind patterns move the rainfall. An effect is apparent in records for the last 3,000 years. In graph a below, 10Be (solar activity) and Fe (rainfall) have a decent correlation coefficient (r) of 0.45, while the 14C (solar activity) and Fe (rainfall) correlation in b has a lower correlation (r) of 0.21. Varma et al say: “the large correlation coefficient for 10Be would suggest that ca. 20% (i.e., r2) of late Holocene rainfall and hence SWW variability could be attributable to solar forcing.” They conclude that the current models don’t give the sun a […] October 25th, 2013 | Tags: Evidence, Rain, Solar Amplification, Solar Radiation, TSI | Category: Global Warming, Spaceweather, The Sun | Print This Post | | “…the role of the Sun is one of the largest unknowns in the climate system” Meteorologists are already aware that changes in the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) can affect the polar regions of Earth. Now, for the first time Lam et al report the magnetic field appears to influence atmospheric pressure in the mid latitudes. Lam compared the average surface pressure at times when the magnetic field is either very strong or very weak and found a statistically significant wave structure similar to an atmospheric Rossby wave. They claim to show that this works through a mechanism that is a conventional meteorological process, and that the effect is large enough to influence weather patterns in the mid-latitudes. The size of the effect is similar to “initial analysis uncertainties” in “ensemble numerical weather prediction” (which I take to mean “climate models”). They are suggesting that small changes in this solar influence on the upper atmosphere could produce important changes through “non-linear evolution of atmospheric dynamics”. Jo suggests that IPCC-favoured climate models don’t include any solar magnetic effect at all, which is just one of many reasons why they don’t work. The large scale wandering convolutions of the jet […] October 9th, 2013 | Tags: Evidence, Jet Streams, Rossby Waves, Solar Amplification, Solar-Magnetic | Category: Global Warming, Spaceweather, The Sun | Print This Post | | |
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