NASA Missions Help Explain, Predict Severity of Solar Storms

An unexpected solar storm shook our planet on April 23, 2023, causing dawn as far in the south as southern Texas in the United States and taking the world by surprise.

Two days earlier, the sun castigated a coronal mass ejection (CME) – a cloud of energy particles, magnetic fields and solar material – to the earth. Space scientists have taken note, expecting that it can cause disturbances in the magnetic field of the earth, known as the geomagnetic storm. But the CME was not particularly fast or massive, and it was preceded by a relatively low solar thrust, suggesting that the storm would be minor. But it has become serious.

Using NASA heliophysics missions, new studies of this storm and others help scientists, to know why certain CMEs have more intense effects – and better predict the impacts of future solar eruptions on our lives.

An article published in The Astrophysical Journal on March 31 suggests that the orientation of the CME compared to the earth probably caused that the storm of April 2023 becomes surprisingly strong.

The researchers gathered observations of five heliophysical space vessels through the inner solar system to study the CME in detail when it is emerged from the sun and went to earth.

They noticed a large coronal hole near the CME birthplace. The coronal holes are areas where the solar wind – a flow of particles flowing from the sun – floods outward at speeds greater than normal.

“The rapid solar wind from this coronal hole acted as an air current, pushing the CME far from its path of straight origin and pushing it closer to the earth orbital plane,” said the main author of the newspaper, Evangelos Paouris of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “In addition to this deviation, the CME also slightly shot slightly.”

Pouris says that this has transformed the magnetic fields of the CME in front of the magnetic field of the earth and held them there – allowing more energy of the sun to pour into the environment of the earth and to intensify the storm.

Meanwhile, the gold mission (NASA global observations on members and the disc) revealed another unexpected consequence of the storm of April 2023 on Earth.

Before, during and after the storm, the gold studied the temperature in the medium thermosphere, part of the high atmosphere of the earth at around 85 to 120 miles above. During the storm, temperatures increased in the wide field of vision of Gold on the Americas. But surprisingly, after the storm, temperatures dropped from around 90 to 198 degrees Fahrenheit lower than before the storm (from around 980 to 1,070 degrees fahrenheit before the storm at 870 to 980 degrees Fahrenheit thereafter).

“Our measure is the first to show generalized cooling in the average thermosphere after a strong storm,” said Xuguang Cai of the University of Colorado, Boulder, principal author of an article on Gold observations published in the JGR Space Physics journal on April 15, 2025.

The temperature of the therosphere is important because it affects the range of satellites in terrestrial orbit and the experience of space debris.

“When the thermosphere cools, it contracts and becomes less dense at satellite altitudes, reducing the drag,” said Cai. “This can ensure that satellites and space debris remain in orbit longer than expected, increasing the risk of collisions. Understand how geomagnetic storms and solar activity affect the upper atmosphere of the earth help protect the technologies on which we all count – such as GPS, satellites and radio communications. “

To predict when a CME triggers a geomagnetic storm or will be “geoeffective”, some scientists combine observations with automatic learning. An article published last November in the review Solar Physics describes such an approach called Geocme.

Automatic learning is a type of artificial intelligence in which an IT algorithm learns data to identify the models, then use these models to make decisions or predictions.

Scientists formed Geocme by giving him images of NASA / ESA (European Space Agency) Soho (Solar and Heliosphric Observatory) of different CMEs which reached the earth with soho of the sun before, during and after each CME. They then told the model if each CME had produced a geomagnetic storm.

Then, when he received images of three different scientific instruments on Soho, the predictions of the model were very precise. On 21 geoeffective CME, the model has properly predicted 21; From 7 non-geefective, he properly predicts 5 of them.

“The algorithm is promising,” said Heliophysicist Jack Ireland of the Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA in Greenbelt, Maryland, who was not involved in the study. “Understanding whether a CME will be geoeffective or not can help us protect infrastructure in space and technological systems on earth. This article shows that automatic learning approaches to predict geoeffective CMEs are possible. ”

During a serious geomagnetic storm in May 2024 – the strongest earth in rattle in more than 20 years – NASA stereo (Observatory of solar land relations) measured the structure of the Magnetic Field of CMEs when they passed.

When a CME goes to earth first strikes a spacecraft, that the spaceship can often measure the CME and its magnetic field directly, helping scientists to determine how strong the geomagnetic storm will be strong on earth. As a rule, the first spaceship to be hit is a million kilometers from the earth to the sun in a place called Lagrange Point 1 (L1), giving us only 10 to 60 minutes of advanced warning.

By chance, during the storm of May 2024, when several CMEs broke out of the sun and merged on earth, the NASA stereo-A-A spacecraft was between us and the sun, about 4 million miles near the sun that L1.

A document published on March 17, 2025, in the newspaper Space Weather reports that if Stereo-A had served as Sentinel CME, it could have provided a precise prediction of the storm strength which results in 2 hours and 34 minutes earlier that a spaceship could in L1.

According to the main author of the newspaper, Eva Weiler of the Meteorological Bureau of the Austrian space in Graz, “no other earth storm led by the earth has never been observed by a spaceship positioned closer to the sun than L1.”

By Vanessa Thomas
Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA, Greenbelt, MD.