Rising Solar Activity will disrupt GPS

[good-hifi]

I'm surprised at the lack of knowledge demonstrated by people on here. Solar flares generate solar radiation, it is nothing to do with heat or light. Solar activity has been known to knock out power supplies across Canada for long periods of time. It won't have a problem knocking out GPS systems.

[Darren]

[premgyani]

Oh my ... so the Solar activity will rise to record breaking levels sometime in 2012 ? eeek. Does that mean that the Solar radiation will make the Earth boil and we all die ( As predicted by a recent film called "2010" ) mid December ?

I don't know about you guys, but I am getting the chainsaw, chisel and hammer and making myself on of those Ark thingies ...



Prem

[martinloat]

Think more in terms of your GPS receiver being blinded for a few tens of minutes like a flashgun has gone off, swamping your normal vision (signal).
Of much more interest is the connection between sunspot activity and weather patterns on Earth - get your holidays in early 'cause were up for some rough weather 'till it all dies back again.
I wonder what the "global warming community" will try and attribute it to?

For those interested enough to want to know more; Google the European Space Agencies Soho and Cluster projects.
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[DennisN]

[mostdom]

[M8TJT]

It just floats around until it ends up on the mount of olives or some such unlikely place. Problem is you won't know where you are, but by then you will be past caring anyway

[colbrook]

We can safely assume that the satellites themselves are adequately protected against solar flare activity, else the military GPS users would be as much affected as the civilians as the Sun goes through its regualar 11-year cycle of rising and falling activity. The problem is that the increased radio noise at the GPS receiver when the Sun is highly active can prevent the cheap and simple user-grade SatNav sets from receiving the spacecraft signals properly. Solar activity prediction is notoriously imprecise and always subject to unpredictable and unforseen solar flares, even in periods when the Sun is in its quiet phase.

I have had GPS receivers of various kinds since 1994 and have therefore been through a solar maximum before, when user-grade SatNav sets were much less efficient than is now the case. At worst, I believe we can expect solar flare events affecting GPS for a few hours, as now, but more frequently over the next few years. YMMV though!

[DennisN]

[stuartb]

Wrote this and then realised that it partly repeats points already made in the thread - hopefully there's enough new to make it worth still posting... cheers.

I am not a fan of doomsday news, but recently had course with work to look into some of the work done on the potential effects of solar activity. There is a possibility that such activity could cause damage to power infrastructure so GPS disruption would be a minor problem by comparison. This has happened before in a small way (Quebec and New York 1989), but its mooted that large transfrormers on power grids could be destroyed. Given that these have lead times normally of 1 - 2 years, the loss of several could cause severe problems for month/years (so best get those car chargers for the iPhone and start making the tinfoil helmets!).

If you want to know more about the area, try Googling "Solar Superstorm" and "EMP commission". You'll find information from a US federal commission which was looking at the possibilities of manmade electromagnetic pulse (e.g. from a nuclear bomb), but the information about likelihood and potential impact of solar activity is in there too. The thinking seems to be that there's a 100-200 year likelihood. A severe event has happened before (1859) but we didn't have much that could be damaged back then. It's perhaps no surprise that Nasa has just launched a new telescope designed to provide better predictive information on solar activity.

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