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Solar Storms Pose Serious Threat To Business Systems For Next Three Years

Prepared by Richard Sherman & Associates, Inc.

O praise with lion-music such as that heard in the air
When the roaring golden lion that roams the heavens
Devours the dark, and multitudes and magnitudes respond.
—Edith Sitwell, The Outcasts, Praise We Great Men

Another chapter in the long saga of mankind’s dealings with the sun is in the writing. The aspirations and technology of man are on a collision course with the sun’s ability to periodically burst forth with enormous pulses of geomagnetic energy and damaging waves of radiation. In the last decade we have majored in producing devices and systems that are particularly vulnerable to damage from solar misbehavior.

Past generations and civilizations were not nearly as vulnerable to the sun’s unseen and unheard fits of rage. Even so, it played a central role in most cultures. Often this took the form of worshipping a sun god. Other times it was having an ancient Hebrew prophet stop the sun in its course across the sky to authenticate his divine connections. And then there was Icarus, the fabled son of Daedalus, whose pride led him to ignore his father’s admonitions about flying too high. After fashioning wings of feathers attached to shoulders by wax, he flew so close to the sun that the wax melted, causing him to fall into the sea and drown.

Is today’s sophisticated electronic gear analogous to Icarus’ flying equipment in terms of susceptibility to damage by the sun? The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently announced that unusually intense solar activity, expected to occur in the early part of the new century, poses a potential threat to sensitive electronic equipment. Businesses and other organizations that rely upon such equipment are in jeopardy of being severely impacted by these events.

Solar Maximum, or Solar Max, as the current event has been dubbed, the period when the sun is most active, occurs in 11-year cycles. Experts are predicting that this event, Solar Cycle 23, will occur “erratically” anytime through the years 2000-2002.

No one really knows how significant a threat these sun storms could be. In theory, according to NOAA scientists, a major burst of solar energy could cause the collapse of power grid systems and damage electrical transformers, knock out satellites for days, zap airline passengers and crews with high doses of radiation and black out radio signals for long periods. Auroras could be visible in the night sky as low as the equator. In fact, the chance of all of these extreme solar storm-related events occurring simultaneously is very low.

Such a scenario would require peak disturbances, and no one is forecasting such a cataclysmic event. The odds of less intense but nevertheless damaging storms happening are much more realistic. During the last Solar Max period in 1989, a geomagnetic storm knocked out power throughout the Canadian province of Quebec for a number of hours.

SEC Keeps Track of Space Weather Happenings

The Space Environment Center (SEC) is the arm of the NOAA that keeps track of what is going on in space for the agency. Located in the foothills of the Rockies above the city of Boulder, Colorado, the agency is run jointly by the NOAA and the U.S. Air Force. The NOAA is a large government agency that encompasses the National Weather Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, among others.

One of the SEC’s chief concerns is “space weather,” the cosmological disturbances and turbulent storms that mostly originate with solar events and streak through space, sometimes impacting human activities. Whether they are solar flares, coronal mass ejections or other disturbances created by the sun, they create solar weather that can make for problems on earth.

Sun storms create weather conditions in space that the agency can track in these three areas:

• Geomagnetic storms
• Solar radiation storms
• Radio blackouts

In fact, the NOAA has become so concerned with these storms and their potential to disrupt earthly routine that it has come up with sets of scales to measure the intensity of activity in these three areas. These scales, introduced in November of last year, are somewhat similar to the Richter scales used to measure the intensity of earthquakes.

Each type of storm is measured with a rating of from one to five, five being the most intense. Thus, geomagnetic storms are rated G1 to G5, the solar radiation storm scale goes from S1 to S5, and the radio blackout scale starts at R1 and goes as high as R5.

Impact Expected

Geomagnetic storms pose the greatest threat to sensitive electronic equipment. These surges of energy from the sun can not only affect power systems, but spacecraft and satellites, pipelines and radio propagation. A G5 storm has the potential to completely collapse regional utility grids, damaging transformers. It can also cause satellites problems with orientation, tracking and up/down-linking of data. Even the most minor of geomagnetic storms, a G1, can bring about weak power grid fluctuations and some problems with satellite operations. The NOAA predicts that there will be four days during the current sunspot cycle when solar storms will reach the G5 level of intensity. The probability of this happening at least once during the year 2000 is about 86%. A G4 geomagnetic storm is labeled as “severe” and is expected to result in the collapse of portions of power grids and noticeable voltage stability. The NOAA expects that 100 such storms will occur during the current cycle. It is virtually certain that one or more of these storms will occur this year.

Although the damage from solar radiation storms is less dramatic, an S5 event has the potential of giving the equivalent of 100 x-rays to a person in an aircraft cruising at high altitude. Needless to say, an astronaut caught outside his or her spacecraft during such an event would receive very high doses of radiation. Satellites can be lost, data memory can be seriously impacted, star trackers could lose track of their sources and permanent damage may be sustained by solar panels. On the lowest end of the scale, however, S1 storms are expected to have minimal impact on high-frequency radio signals in polar regions only. An S5 solar radiation storm is considered “extreme” and is expected to occur somewhat less than once per sunspot cycle. The odds are about one in four that an S5 storm will happen this year. Three S4 solar radiation storms (“severe”) are expected per cycle, and the probability of an S4 storm during 2000 is about 78%.

The most extreme radio blackouts during Solar Max can cause total collapse of high frequency radio communications on the sunlit side of the earth for a number of hours. This could also mean a complete breakdown for many hours of communication and navigation for shipping and in-flight aircraft on the sunlit portion of the planet. Global positioning systems would be haywire during this time all over the globe. The least threatening R1 radio blackout would cause only minor high-frequency radio signal problems on the sunlit side of the planet, but mariners and en route aviators may experience the loss of radio contact for “tens of minutes,” and minor low-frequency navigation signal loss for brief intervals. Less than one R5 radio blackout is expected per cycle. Chances of an R5 in 2000 are about 30%. Approximately eight R4 radio blackouts are expected per cycle and the probability of one or more of them taking place during 2000 is about 98%.

Predictions Not Possible

NOAA scientists say that there will probably be about four extremely strong one-day geomagnetic storms and around 60 such severe storms during Solar Cycle 23. But there is no way to predict when they will happen.

NASA recently put the ACE satellite into space, a bird that gives space weather forecasters about an hour’s advance warning of disturbances headed this way. Unfortunately, a truly severe event might also knock out this satellite, too.

The Space Environment Center (SEC) can alert organizations using space weather information about what is coming with what they are confident is 100% accuracy. A host of scientific data on solar activity is available on NOAA and SEC sites, with many links to other organizations tracking Solar Max. There are solar and geophysical forecast links, solar activity summaries and region reports, solar event listings, three-day geomagnetic and flare probability studies by region, coronal reports and warnings. Alerts are available under the “Advisories” and the “Today’s Space Weather” links at the organization’s web site, http://sec.noaa.gov.

What good these alerts will do for organizations depends, of course, on the extent of their vulnerability and how well they have prepared for solar events. As most organizations today rely in varying degrees on electronic and communications equipment to conduct day-to-day operations, contingency planners should be aware of the threat and take at least minimal precautions to protect the integrity of their organization’s systems during the affected period.

Links to NOAA and SEC Solar Weather Information Sites

New NOAA Space Weather Scales Make Solar Max Effects More Predictable

NOAA Space Weather Scales

The Solar Cycle On The Rise

Epilogue

Could there be a connection between mankind’s ancient and modern encounters with the sun? One recent attempt to bridge that gap has been the exploration of messages about modern events that may have been embedded in the Hebrew letters of the 3,000 year old Torah.

Researchers into Bible codes have discovered dozens of words and phrases that seem to describe an electronic debacle. Could their findings be related somehow to Solar Max? God only knows.

Focusing on equidistant letter sequences (ELSs) in the Torah, these researchers have discovered terms such as “crush telecommunications,” “strange malfunction” and “solar surge” entwined with other words like “corona,” “GPS” and “millennium.” They believe these findings strongly suggest a solar-related communications crisis.

All of these “codes” are packed into a tight pattern in an obscure section of the book of Numbers. Because the chapter where they appear is so repetitious, the pattern repeats 12 times in the section.

Although they stress that their discoveries can’t be used to predict the future, one group of Bible code researchers has gone so far as to suggest that these findings just might turn out to be related to Solar Max.

For more information, visit the Bible Code Critic website. 

Prepared by
Richard Sherman & Associates, Inc.
Casualty Actuarial Consulting
1000 Benson Way Suite 204
Ashland, OR 97520
541-488-0331

riskVue | The webzine for risk management professionals
March 2000