This whole current flap about the Coronal Mass Ejection that happened earlier this week is a big ZERO.
We've had MUCH larger Solar Flares and CME's in the last several years, and there's been little to NO damage on the Earth.
The satellite operators have far more to worry about, but even they haven't seen anything from this one.
The fact NOAA and NASA can't agree on how big/damaging this one is/was/MIGHT be should tell you something.
Personally, I tend to favor NOAA, as they've always had a better grip on Space Weather than NASA.
The lead-in picture is from an M7.9 solar flare that occurred on 24 March 2012, and the bottom picture is from today, 14 July 2012, at 19:16 UTC.
I did notice my GPS took a LOT longer than normal to finally lock on this morning...
ReplyDeleteMight, possibly, maybe, somewhat related to some propagation changes, but usually "bad" signal distortion like from a scrambled ionosphere doesn't affect the lock time as much as it screws with PDOP and HDOP, and the other things that determine the precision of the position.
ReplyDeleteMine have been showing a normal time-to-first-fix......so far!
All that happened here in Arizona was a disruption of DirecTV satellite signal, mostly due to the intense thundershowers this afternoon. I did manage to photograph the sunspot causing the flare between the clouds earlier today.
ReplyDeletehttp://blogfodder.vernabob.com/20120714-ar1520.jpg
And the HF bands (up through 15 Meters) are still open tonight (2100 local), and 6 Meters is dead.
ReplyDeleteSo much for the SID people were predicting!