STOCKTON SPRINGS, Maine — Two big solar storms aimed at Earth this week have served to highlight just why a retired space weather scientist living in the midcoast area still keeps his eyes on the skies.
Dr. Lee Snyder was part of the U.S. Air Force’s first space weather program in the 1960s, and was part of a crew that worked around the clock at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado during the Apollo space missions to watch the sun. They needed to make sure astronauts would be alerted about any dangerous solar flares, which send clouds of charged particles into space.
This week’s solar events could create magnetic storms that interfere with GPS, radio transmissions and power grids once they reach the Earth’s magnetic field. However, the current flares aren’t expected to cause unmanageable impacts to national infrastructure, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center.
But Snyder said such events can have major effects daily life.
“A solar flare is an eruption on the sun that enhances the solar wind to the point where it can become hazardous to satellites and impact the electric grid,” he said. “It can impact the global positioning system, or astronauts who are outside of the earth’s magnetic bubble.”
The 1969 moon landing happened during the peak of the sun’s 11-year cycle, called solar maximum, a time that has the most disturbances and solar flares. The sun is currently in the peak of the cycle again, Snyder said, or just a little beyond the peak.
But the magnetically charged solar storms — known as coronal mass ejections — that were expected to hit Earth Thursday and Friday also were forecast to trigger impressive auroral displays, according to Reuters. The northern lights were likely to be visible in clear skies along the northern tier of the United States.
Dr. David Batuski, the chairperson of the University of Maine’s physics and astronomy department, said Friday morning that when he asks his students if anyone has seen the northern lights, he is amazed at how few people have.
“Living in Maine, it’s something we all can do, and it’s something that not too much of the world has access to,” he said.
Batuski said when northern lights are predicted, he encourages people to get out to a dark place to watch — if the skies are clear.
“Around Maine, there’s a lot of dark places,” he said.
Snyder said that he also spent years researching northern lights while he was in the Air Force, studying the relationship of the northern lights to other geomagnetic activity and impacts to high frequency communication. That has been superseded by satellite communication, he said.
“I had the pleasure of being in charge of an aircraft that chased the auroras,” he said. “We originated in Alaska and would go over the Bering Strait, north of Siberia.”
On President Jimmy Carter’s Inauguration Day in January 1977, Snyder and his crew were scheduled to fly over Russia, but due to security concerns, the U.S. State Department told them they should stay on the ground.
“We decided to anyway — and nothing happened,” he said, adding that the flight was rewarded by glimpses of the swirling, colorful aurora borealis. “You always saw the aurora.”
He also worked in Moscow, Maine, to help test the over-the-horizon backscatter radar program, which the Air Force developed in the 1970s to detect and track airplanes flying over the Atlantic. Snyder and his wife, Patricia, moved to Maine in 1990, after he retired from the military. They had good memories from their honeymoon trip to the Schoodic area, where they came so they could get a good look at the July 20, 1963, solar eclipse.
“It was [my wife’s] suggestion,” Snyder quickly pointed out.
The scientist said that the strongest recorded geomagnetic storm in history happened in 1859, called the Carrington event. Sunspots from that storm were easily visible as flares of white light. The solar blast of charged particles knocked out the telegraph system in the United States and northern lights were seen as far south as Cuba.
“The variation of the earth’s magnetic field was like nothing we’d ever seen before,” Snyder said.
American researchers said earlier this spring that fierce solar blasts that could have matched the severity of the Carrington event narrowly missed Earth in 2012. But they, and Snyder, said that if a storm like that happened now, the damage would be much greater because of our increasing reliance on vulnerable technology. A 2013 study estimated that a solar storm like the one in 1859 could cost the global economy $2.6 trillion.
“We’re becoming more dependent on global positioning systems,” Snyder said, adding that if the electric grid was damaged, the components needed to fix it are “not things people keep on the shelf.”
In 1989, Quebec lost power in a widespread outage caused by problems due to magnetic issues, Snyder said.
Batuski said there is little to do to prepare for solar storms.
“Basically, all you can do is just recover as best you can,” he said. “When you have an extended, long set of power lines hanging out there, there’s not much you can do.”
Snyder and Batuski both said that there’s a lot to be gained by paying attention to what’s happening beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.
“Even though we are on this little rock going around the sun, we are connected with all this other stuff going on around us in space,” Batuski said. “We are definitely part of this universe. It’s probably a good idea to know something about it.”