Solar Storm

View 710 Tuesday, January 24, 2012

State of the Union tonight. I am working on other stuff; this will likely be a political speech since our current President seems more eager to campaign than to govern. Perhaps he will explain his decision on the oil pipeline?

This may be of interest:

Solar Storm

www.solarham.com <http://www.solarham.com/>

Pursuant to yesterday’s (0400 Z) long-duration M8.7 flare, the solar energetic particle (SEP) event continues; the tail of protons over 100 MEV has decayed back to near-normal levels but total protons over 10 MeV is still 30 dB over the level at the start of the flare.

The CME scheduled to hit today is still expected to arrive about 0900 ET (1400 Z); there is not yet any precursor activity in the ACES data. G2 – G3 geomagnetic storming is expected.

There is a video of the CME on the site.

Jim

We are well overdue for a big solar event, but we have no way to predict this; only that they seem to occur at about one century intervals, and our last really big one was in 1859

I ran across this looking for something else, and remembered that Andrew Marshall and I are near contemporaries. He was at RAND Corporation when I was at Aerospace, and I think we may have met back in those times. He’s still at it, and has become a national treasure.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Andrew_Marshall

Time for the State of the Union.