No one likes this article?? Are you all too cool for solar weather and crappily scanned PDFs now?
I have been busy but I read the article when it came out. Love Kathryn Schulz, especially now that I can imagine her telling her young daughter toddler versions of this nerdy stuff, but I'm sure there will be nitpicking once people notice this post.
I like scanned PDFs and screenshots/photos of text, they are evidence that someone cares enough about the written word to reproduce it, contemporary equivalent of a dogeared book with an owner's name in it.
I also love solar weather, will probably read this and respond meaningfully, but am otherwise preoccupied today.
I read the article a while ago. I thought it was really good and also that it made me think of the famous NYer article about the possibility of a major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest which, I think, actually made a difference in attracting attention to the problem.
I suppose the connection is obvious, but I just noticed that the earthquake article was from the same writer.
They don't get into individual residence options. Will rooftop solar or gas generators be a good backup option or are they just as screwed?
When I read the article I was skeptical of the claim that GPS is used in time synchronization. I thought this happened mainly using the network time protocol, NTP, over the internet, which I imagine in the end refers to ground-based atomic clocks.
BA! Unless you aren't the BA. Who can tell anymore?
9. Uncreative, but yeah it's the name I've been using for the hand full of comments I've left here over the years. (I was disappointed that I didn't manage to see and take a picture of the lights on Friday night.)
That was so nice of you all to explain that you weren't ignoring the solar weather after all. I appreciate it.
It's a really good article for the most part though this bit is wrong:
"Finally, enhanced solar radiation increases the density of certain regions of the Earth's atmosphere, which increases the drag"
No. Irradiating gas doesn't increase its density. It can't. If you pump energy into an uncontained gas it expands; its density would reduce. This is seventeenth century physics.
So now I have to wonder what else Schulz got slightly wrong.
The last time we had a New Yorker article on something scientific they got something basic wrong as well IIRC. Talking about inserting human proteins into yeast?
Schulz has a history degree and I suppose her fzct checkers probably do as well.
11: I went outside to look because we're up at 52°N but get a lot of light pollution from the city. I kinda thought I saw something and it kinda looks like something on my phone's 30-second exposures. But I wasn't sure so I called it auroroa maybealis.
To comfort Heebie, I've been all up on Carrington events since the not very good but very spacenerd-pleasing Stephen Baxter book Sunstorm.
8: plenty of things with NTP get NTP time from something that syncs to GPS time.
That said not very much works like telegraphy did in 1859 any more - e.g. you're never ever going to get current in a fibre optic cable by induction, they're made out of glass, it's not electricity that they conduct.
I work in a related field and was impressed by the accuracy of the article! I didn't see any major errors.
In a couple places, including in the sentence mentioned in 12, Schulz does refer to solar radiation when the relevant mechanism is really the geomagnetic storm.
The storm doesn't heat the atmosphere uniformly: it deposits energy in high latitude regions and at relatively low altitudes (compared to spacecraft orbits). However, the effects of the heating can propagate to lower latitudes/higher altitudes, and cause increased density and drag in these regions. This is what happened to the Starlink satellites in 2022: https://doi.org/10.1029/2023SW003748.
16: Long submarine cables include regularly spaced optical amplifiers-the signal is optical but there are conductors which power the amplifiers.
The satellite detail and drag is really interesting!
How long can a submarine cable be? Even the biggest nuclear sub is only like 100 meters long.
The storm doesn't increase the density of the atmosphere. It causes lower layers to expand, pushing the layers above them further up. So the satellites find themselves passing through denser air... but the radiation has not made the air denser.
I agree with that, but I'd say it's consistent with "increases the density of certain regions of the Earth's atmosphere" rather than "increases the density of the atmosphere."
Unnamed NOAA writer does a better job:
"When the Sun adds extra energy to the atmosphere the low density layers of air at LEO altitudes rise and are replaced by higher density layers that were previously at lower altitudes. As a result, the spacecraft now flies through the higher density layer".
Clear and intuitive.
If I flood the centre of London, thousands of wealthy people will have to leave their homes and move into the surrounding suburbs. But it would not be very useful to say that flooding London has made suburban people richer.