Today, you have to watch where you’re going and double-check your GPS because we’re currently at the pinnacle of the 11-year solar cycle.
Our sun discharged a m(–foul word(s) removed–)ive amount of solar flare just this Thursday. So, if you’re your phone’s mapping tool and relying on your GPS when driving to find your location or for any other purposes, you must have an emergency backup navigation system, such as a printed map because effects of Solar flares are disruption of radio communications, devices like car navigation systems, cell phones, airplanes and other gadgets that use GPS system. Don’t always rely on your GPS to give you directions.
A research conducted in Cornell University last 2006, proved that solar flares can cause GPS devices to malfunction or misrepresent your location temporarily. Mr. Paul Kintner Jr. head of Cornell’s GPS Laboratory said, “If you’re driving to the beach using your car’s navigation system, you’ll be OK. If you’re on a commercial airplane in zero visibility weather, maybe not,” In fact, the Cornell researchers already warned in 2006 that when 2011 comes, we would probably experience a lot of GPS disruption.
“Under the right conditions, solar storms can create extra electrical currents in Earth’s magnetosphere — the region around the planet controlled by our magnetic field. The electrical power grid is particularly vulnerable to these extra currents, which can infiltrate high-voltage transmission lines, causing transformers to overheat and possibly burn out.” Reported National Geographic.
Now, electric utilities and grid operators are preparing to respond to such problems nationwide.
Director of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, John Bogdan, told The (–foul word(s) removed–)ociated Press that it is expected that a number of such blasts will occur over the next three to five years — and there’s more to come. Probably bigger flares. he likened this week’s flare to “probably a two or three.” (scaled from one to five).
This week’s flare registered M9.3 on the “Richter scale of flares,” about the highest level in the “medium” category. (said to be called a “coronal m(–foul word(s) removed–) ejection”) that fall into the “X” category that can cause global radio blackouts can be cl(–foul word(s) removed–)ified as larger flares, but large M-cl(–foul word(s) removed–) flares can also cause disturbances in radio connections.
As the solar cycle approaches solar maximum in 2013, This is only one of a series of recent bouts of severe space weather. Some major flares already came just last February and June, and more may follow.