Major solar storm smacks Earth, may pull

northern lights south

WASHINGTON A severe solar storm smacked Earth with a surprisingly big geomagnetic jolt
Tuesday, potentially affecting power grids and GPS tracking while pushing the colorful northern
lights farther south, federal forecasters said.
So far no damage has been reported. Two blasts of magnetic plasma left the sun on Sunday,
combined and arrived on Earth about 15 hours earlier and much stronger than expected, said
Thomas Berger, director of the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado.
This storm ranks a 4, called severe, on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 1to-5 scale for geomagnetic effects. It is the strongest solar storm to blast Earth since the fall of
2013. It's been nearly a decade since a level 5 storm, termed extreme, has hit Earth.
Forecasters figured it would come late Tuesday night into Wednesday morning; instead, it arrived
just before 10 a.m. EDT. They had forecast it to be a level 1.
"It's significantly stronger than expected," Berger said. Forecasters had predicted a glancing blow
instead of dead-on hit. Another theory is that the combination of the two storms made it worse,
but it's too early to tell if that's so, he said.
The storm seemed to be weakening slightly, but that may not continue, and it could last all day,
officials said. It has the potential to disrupt power grids but only temporarily. It also could cause
degradation of the global positioning system, so tracking maps and locators may not be as
precise as normal.