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Thursday, November 30, 2023

Are You in the Far North of the US?

If you're in the northern tier of the US, you might want to keep an eye out for possible aurora displays tonight (late on 11/30 into 12/1) and into tomorrow night (12/1 into 12/2).  According to SpaceWeather.com reporting from NOAA, a cannibal CME is going to impact Earth on December 1.  As I write this it's already December 1 by Universal Time (UTC) and there's no sign of anything by the planetary K index, which is currently 0.33.  More on that later. 

A CANNIBAL CME IS COMING: NOAA models confirm that a Cannibal CME will strike our planet on Dec. 1st. Cannibal CMEs form when a fast CME sweeps up a slower CME ahead of it. The combination contains intense, tangled magnetic fields that can do a good job sparking auroras when they reach Earth. If a Cannibal CME strikes Earth on Dec. 1st, as predicted, geomagnetic storm levels could reach category G3 (Strong). Aurora alerts: SMS Text

Space.com described it with a bit more detail.   

The rapid Earth-bound CME left the sun on Nov. 29 during a powerful M9.8-class solar flare eruption. But it isn't alone. The speedy plasma outburst will merge with several slower upstream CMEs that left the sun a day earlier (Nov. 28), creating a "Cannibal CME" that will likely trigger a strong geomagnetic storm akin to a Nov. 5 event that supercharged auroras and STEVE around the world.

Since I've personally farted more energy than an M9.8 class flare, I have hard time thinking of a flare that isn't X-class as "powerful," although M9.8 is only 0.2 units lower than an X1.0 flare.  I don't think of X1 flares as particularly powerful, either.

About the timing, though, NOAA also posts video created by a model that shows the progress of the CME.  I ran the video and hit the stop button at the time when it appears to hit maximum impact to Earth.  It appears to be around 12:00 UTC or 7:00 AM EST tomorrow.  The peak plasma density, though, is earlier: 7:00 UTC or 2:00 AM EST.  The west coast and western states may well be better-placed for this CME impact than farther east.

NOAA is forecasting a geomagnetic storm which could reach G3 category, classified as a "strong" storm, that could cause radio blackouts throughout the HF radio spectrum on the sunlit side of the Earth for hours at a time.  

All sites covering the possible storm point out that we had a G3 storm back on November 5th, accompanied by gorgeous aurora displays.  We don't get to see auroras this far south unless the geomagnetic storm is just below TEOTWAWKI levels, but my memory of that G3 storm will be forever linked to what I wrote about a week later, having radio contact with ("working") Hawaii on the 50 MHz band.  Which is just slightly below what used to be TV VHF channel 2 in the days before digital HDTV.  (Kids, ask your parents or grandparents)

What will this CME impact do?  We have even less data and experience to base forecasts on with space weather that we have everyday rain/sun type weather.  That said, here's the NOAA forecast.  All I can say is the closer you are to the green or red areas you are, the better your chances of seeing something.



23 comments:

  1. The 00:00-03:00 Dec 1 UTC Planetary K is 4.33. Its here.

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  2. I have been all over that site and I cannot find the source of the image above. The "30-minute" forecast shows a peak around 13:17 UTC that is a) over Siberia, and b) 30% of that magnitude. How do you get the one above?

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    1. It was in the Space.com article that I used as a source. I didn't find it myself.

      Space.com article and I had to right click on the graphic and open in a new tab, then save it to my computer.

      Not really the answer I'd like to have.

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    2. That same pic was also pushed by a YouTube guy who does space weather stuff, and he seemed hysterical about it. I can neither find its origin, nor even find a way to make a prediction more than 24 hours out. That image shows a creation date, but not the date for which the prediction applies. I smell government fear-mongering and fake imagery, but that could just be my paranoid nose talking.

      I also looked through the textual forecast logs, and can find nothing except the possibility of a G3 for a couple of hours.



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    3. I forget to add, here: https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
      This seems like it should be the authoritative original source.

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    4. For younger readers without grandparents conveniently nearby, I recall watching Channel 2 on a few occasions in the 1960's in Colorado Springs and receiving Channel 2 from Oregon.

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    5. Anon 10:56 - there used to be a fairly active community of guys with outside antennas that actively looked for distant stations - what every other part of the radio hobby (that I know of) calls DXing. I know a guy who still monitors channel 2, and tells me when he sees stations in the Caribbean or South America.

      Malatrope, I find there's a tremendous amount of concern about these CMEs, really an unreasonable amount of concern. My joke about farting with more energy than a M9.8 solar flare is based on the reality that I can feel the former but not the latter. I think there's only one but I'll say there's no more than a handful of flares that have caused damage to the power grid since the grid was established and the sun burps these things out frequently - almost daily around the cycle peaks. For reasons that seem to be psychological, there seems to be a hunger for scare-mongering videos and posts about the end of the world coming from a solar flare.

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    6. I agree, there's only been one of any real importance (Carrington Event), and that was before we hardened everything, and inventing proper grounding. But they just love to scare people. The most ridiculous of that, though, comes from those pushing EMP Terror. If we had enough nukes going off to produce significant EMP damage, the radiation would be more of a problem than the electron flow. But again, you have to go to and understand the original research papers.

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    7. The one I was thinking of was in Canada in March of 1989, that caused a blackout. I had heard that was due to a transformer getting damaged, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

      A Carrington event would certainly be a Really Bad Thing, but they're also extremely rare. A flare of that level could be on the far side of the sun and have no effect on Earth - and there was one that might have been in that class back in November of 2003 that was pointed off the limb of the sun that did essentially nothing to us. That was cycle 23, BTW, which was stronger than the previous cycle and still stronger than this one.

      So the flare has to be big and it has to be positioned in the right part of sun to affect Earth. Two improbable, independent events.

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  3. I just moved to Utah. No bueno.

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  4. Here's a weird question for you SiG- do (or could) these episodes have an effect on animals? Our housecat has been going spastic in the exact timeframe you described for this event. It started last night (11/30) with generally upset behavior, pacing, staring out windows, ‘rowling’ (cross between growl & meowing), walking on us all night. I know you’re not an animal behavioral scientist, but this aberration of his normal behavior so perfectly coincides with this event, I had to ask! BTW, as of this writing (1724 EST) he’s back to normal.

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    1. The stuff I’ve seen and read pretty much says that real, controlled experiments don’t show that. My cat has been himself with no odd behaviors, but two different subjects widely separated from each other doesn’t say much. External things, like latitude or even the specific geology of a place, can affect the amount of whatever radiation they’re exposed to.

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  5. What are the best sources to know how to interpret this stuff?

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    1. I noticed this last night but I was working on last night's post and I don't have handy, easy answer.

      The best probably depends on what perspective you're looking from, and mine is the radio propagation viewpoint. In that case the ARRL publications are probably the best, but I can't name titles off the top of my head. They put out newsletters weekly, including one on propagation that talks about solar activity all the time. The K7RA Solar Update:
      https://www.arrl.org/news/the-k7ra-solar-update-806

      (I don't know if anyone can read that online or if you have to be signed in as a member)

      Certainly web searches for various terms will help. NOAA has a bunch of sites here:
      https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
      and I go here regularly, sometimes multiple times/day
      https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/planetary-k-index

      Other sites that are useful for current news are:
      https://www.spaceweather.com/
      and a similar name
      https://spaceweathernews.com/

      Hope that's a good start.

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    2. Depends on your definition of "best". I sure enjoy watching the Space Weather Woman. :)

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    3. FWIW (not much), I think she's too sensationalistic. It's the problem with YouTube, everyone is sensationalistic so they can get more clicks. The more views the better.

      I haven't tried to keep score on how right she is on impacts, and she was (or still is) a space weather forecaster for one of the big aerospace companies, so I assume she'd have to be better than average. We don't know if the forecasts would be the same.

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    4. I am a ham radio operator so that is my perspective. I just still have not got the hang of interpreting solar flux, K index, A index, etc. on propagation.

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    5. Solar flux is a measure of noise put out by the sun on 10.7cm or about 2.8 GHz. I've heard that frequency comes from observing the Hydrogen alpha line in radio astronomy, but that's at half the frequency. As a general rule, the higher the solar flux level, the more likely high layers in the ionosphere, like the F1 and F2 layers will be reflective and long distance propagation will be better up through, say 10 and even 6 meters.

      The thing that felt like a slap in the face when I first learned it is that there is no known mechanism by which the solar flux, that noise can affect the ionosphere, so that solar flux phenomena that I've known since around '68 is correlation, not causation. The mechanisms that are known to increase ionospheric density are from charged particles hitting the ionosphere; the solar wind, flares and coronal mass ejections. Solar flux is apparently driven by the same things in the solar cycle that drive the flares and CMEs.

      The effects of the solar wind and that other junk is on the geomagnetic field, measured by the A and K indices. Yeah, two ways to measure essentially the same thing. A index gives different and higher numbers but I don't think either one is clearly a better indicator than the other all the time. Geomagnetic storms tend to increase RF path loss (attenuation) and they tend to attenuate the most at lowest frequencies, with stronger storms affecting higher frequencies. They can cause blackouts where no ionospheric propagation happens. G1 storms (K = 5) don't seem to enhance 6m, although they seem to make 10m less reliable. The two G3 storms we had in the last month seemed to enhance 6m, especially as they started decreasing in strength. The NOAA Planetary K-index site has some of this information.

      I'd heard of the paradoxical effect of more intense geomagnetic storms enhancing propagation at VHF, even if only briefly, but only experienced it myself for the first time this year. I'm learning as I go.

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    6. Thanks, SiG! That is some more knowledge in the bank.

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  6. The local papers and radio stations were saying to "Look North for a faint glow", but it's been too cloudy. The HF bands were really active today, with 10 M staying open til 1830 LT. 15 sounded kind "strange", like even the background noise had some "phase shift" things going on. Kind of a "swooshing" noise mixed in with the band noise.

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    1. I had the radio on 6m during our local afternoon, say 1900 to 2200 and while it was dead most of the time, there were some very interesting exceptions. At one time I heard four stations from Hawaii. Until the 5th of November, I had never heard them ONCE in my 20 years of playing on 6m.

      I didn't work anyone, despite calling the loudest, most consistent signal for a long time, like 20 minutes.

      Earlier in the day, I saw other people reporting very good openings into Europe.

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    2. The band scope on my 101MP is very good once you learn how to use and adjust it. You can see the band kind of "breathing". And if you have any doubt if the band is open just look at the digital sub-bands. The FT8 freq is always popping up out of the noise with very good signals, but nothing on phone. Oh, well....

      And I didn't get my 6M dipole back up. Maybe this week, as we're expecting temps in the 60's!

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