May 2024 solar storm cost $500 million in damages to farmers, new study reveals
The location signals striped on earth by the GPS satellites were extinguished by hundreds of feet during the Gannon solar storm In May of last year, and the disruption lasted up to two days in certain American regions, a new study revealed. The breakdown has wreaked havoc in the agricultural sector, which has undergone more than $ 500 million losses.
A succession of powerful sunscreens at the beginning of May of last year sparked the most powerful solar storm to hit the earth in 20 years. Later, named after the deceased scientist, Jennifer Gannon, the solar storm produced impressive northern dawn as far in the south as Mexico, Portugal and Spain. He also passed the GPS to be unlissed for days.
The farmers of the American Midwest, at the time at the top of the planting season, reported their tractors guided by GPS acting as if they were “possessed” during the storm, according to accounts. A new study has now quantified the size of these GPS errors not only at the top of the storm, but also to its consequences when a persistent dawn continued to distort GPS signals.
A team of researchers from the University of Boston has used data from nearly 100 high-precision GPS receptors dispersed in the United States which form a seismic research network which measures the movements of tectonic plates. It turns out that the network is also perfectly suited for studying the weather effects of space in the earth ionosphere, a layer of electric-loaded air has found 30 miles (48 kilometers) above the earth. The effects of solar storms on the ionosphere can affect the readings of GPS receptors.
“GPS receptors work by assuming that the ionosphere has a uniform plasma density,” Waqar Younas, a researcher in space physics at the University of Boston and the main author of the newspaper, told Space.com. “But a solar storm creates irregularities in the ionosphere and when the signal crosses the ionospheric layers, it grows errors.”
When a solar storm strikes, the charged sunscreen it brings with it heat and disturb the ionosphere. While the weak signals of world positioning satellites pass through this suddenly turbulent region, they are rejected the way.
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Since the fixed GPS receptors of the research network are firmly attached to the ground, any change in their positioning data could only be the result of turbulence in the ionosphere. The measures of this scientific GPS network revealed the extent of these errors with great precision and allowed researchers to rebuild what had happened in the ionosphere during the storm.
“By measuring the signal disruption, we can say the structure of the plasma in the upper atmosphere,” Toshi Nishimura, professor of spatial physics and co-author of the new study, told Space.com.
The analysis of the data revealed that the storm created an “ionospheric plasma wall”, extending to the North American continent. This wall threw GPS signals up to 230 feet (70 meters) in the American central states, with smaller errors up to 65 feet (20 m) reported in the southwest parts of the country.
The peak disturbance lasted around six hours on May 10, 2024, but things remained unstable up to two days, showed the study. After the shaken ionosphere started to calm down, the auroral lights triggered by the storm caused new GPS disturbances while the particles charged with space crossed the atmosphere along the disturbed magnetic field lines. The GPS receiver network has shown errors up to 30 feet (10 m) for the duration of these aurora.
The erratic behavior of agricultural machines guided by the GPS caused by the Gannon solar storm cost more than $ 500 million to American farmers in the American Midwest, according to Terry Griffin, professor of agricultural economy at the Kansas State University.
“Due to Gannon’s storm, corn plantation was delayed because our planters were mainly ineffective,” Griffin told Space.com. “Currently, around 70% of hectares planted in the United States are counting on equipment that uses GPS automated advice to enlarge the direct parallel lines through the field. We no longer even have physical road markers, and the equipment has become larger to the point that we can no longer work when the GPS is removed.”
But agriculture was not the only victim of GPS chaos induced by weather conditions. The planes rely on the GPS not only to follow their path, but especially to know their precise altitude during landing. The errors of up to four meters can be offset, according to Nishimura. But the disturbance of May 10 and 11 of last year was “far beyond this tolerance window,” said Nishimura.
Gannon’s solar storm may have been the strongest in two decades. But that only provided only a weak taste for what the sun is capable of. The worst scenario frequently discussed is the so -called Carrington event – a storm that struck the earth in 1859, eliminating telegraph services from around the world. A storm of this strength today would undoubtedly have large -scale consequences in the world.
“During Gannon’s storm, we saw the most intense impact in the central regions of the United States,” said Nishimura. “But for an event the size of a carrington, we would see disturbances on the whole continent and errors so important that the signal would be unusable.”
Waqar says that in the future, real -time forecasts of ionospheric disturbances associated with forecasts directed by AI of GPS signal irregularities could help correct errors as a storm is progressing.
The study was published in the journal JGR-Space Physics on June 9.
This article was initially published on Space.com.
