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by N0b8ez
768 days ago
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Forgive me for only skimming over the intellectually demanding part of your post. >TL;DR: it was (technically) anywhere from 25-59% as powerful as the Carrington Event. This feels strange to me. If nobody had told me about the CME yesterday, I probably wouldn't have even noticed it. But a CME 10 times as powerful would have caused a global blackout? That makes me feel like the line between "nobody notices it" and "everything is destroyed" is remarkably thin. I'm currently trying to educate myself more on this subject. I'm reading these: https://assets.lloyds.com/assets/pdf-solar-storm-risk-to-the... https://irp.fas.org/congress/2008_hr/emp.pdf Anything else you would recommend that I read? |
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Two other factors are important: firstly, the flare and the CME are inter-related but separate. You can get a big flare, but not a big CME, or the CME can not be Earth-directed, so no hit.
Secondly, Earth's magnetic field has weakened significiantly since 1859 (its strength is cyclical, and related to how the true poles wander and drift over time). This means that smaller events cause larger disruptions to the electromagnetics of Earth.
So we have Dst -1000 for Carrington, and -250 for the storm over the weekend. Due to our impaired EM immune system right now, we could get Carrington level EM disturbance on Earth from smaller events on the sun.