Explainer: Here's what solar storms do to Earth - The Washington Post

NASA reported a large solar flare July 3, which did cause radio blackouts, but that has long since passed the planet.

This sudden snap is a solar flare, which releases a tremendous amount of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum: radio waves and microwave rays, visible light, ultraviolet light, gamma rays and X-rays, all traveling at the speed of light, fast enough to reach Earth in eight minutes.

As more energy is released by a solar flare, it can create shock waves that accelerate particles away from the sun, causing what is known as a particle storm.

With enough energy, a solar flare can project material away from the sun — a coronal mass ejection.

“We’re just toward the beginning of the next solar cycle, so we are starting to see more spots and more magnetic fields twisting up to the surface,” said Phil Scherrer, a professor and senior fellow at the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory at Stanford University.

Maverick astrophysicist predicts unusually intense solar cycle, straying from consensus view.

In an 11-year solar cycle, there can be as many as 2,000 solar flares of varying strength.

“You tend to get more of these events during a large solar cycle, but also during the peak of a solar cycle,” Singer said.

“The energy from a solar flare will interact with the ionosphere — the outermost layer of the atmosphere that’s critical for radio signals,” NASA’s Young said.

This could mean, for instance, that a plane traveling in the far northern hemisphere, where the charged particles released by solar weather are drawn by Earth’s magnetic poles, could lose radio contact.

During a period of intense solar activity in October and November 2003, one solar flare was large enough to exceed the charts used by NOAA