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In November of last year, scientists warned of a “severe” solar storm, the strongest in over two decades, colliding with the Earth.
Solar storms are the result of a surge in solar activity, with the Sun unleashing a barrage of charged particles that can trigger spectacular auroras — and wreak havoc with communications satellites and radio signals — when they reach the Earth’s magnetosphere.
Beyond being ferocious enough to delay the launch of a Mars-bound NASA spacecraft, the storm wreaked absolute havoc with GPS systems back on the ground for hours at a time. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team of scientists found that global navigation satellite systems experienced “significant positioning errors” of over 33 feet during the superstorm, “large enough to disrupt precision agriculture and autonomous transportation industries” across the continental United States.
That’s enough risk to warrant a careful study on these types of events can impact human activity on Earth.
“The results underscore the importance of accurate understanding of various space weather phenomena to enhance our predictive capabilities through coordinated observations and physics‐based modeling and ultimately reducing disruptions to RF applications during space weather events,” the paper reads.
The researchers analyzed observations from several scientific instruments spread out across the US to watch the chaos unfold last November. The Aurora Oval, a ring-shaped area of pronounced activity around the Earth’s geomagnetic north pole where auroras conventionally occur, was pushed south toward the equator. This triggered a “horizontally extended band of intense density gradients” in the upper atmosphere, causing fluctuations in how long signals take to travel through it.
The result: “significant positioning errors at mid-latitudes,” the researchers noted.
The researchers also found that as the auroras became brighter, the observed irregularities became more intense, deteriorating GPS accuracy accordingly.
Fortunately, while farming equipment like GPS-equipped tractors would’ve likely been affected, the November storm occurred long after the farming season concluded.
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