Solar Flares

[fosborn]

Hmmm. Could the curvature of the spherical electric field/double layers around the sun act like a concave reflector that focuses electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency/amplitude back inward/sunward to trigger CME's on the opposite side of that sphere?

cheers

Maybe, like short wave propagation off the ionosphere?

[tholden]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2642265/posts

Dec. 13, 2010: On August 1, 2010, an entire hemisphere of the sun erupted. Filaments of magnetism snapped and exploded, shock waves raced across the stellar surface, billion-ton clouds of hot gas billowed into space. Astronomers knew they had witnessed something big.

It was so big, it may have shattered old ideas about solar activity.

"The August 1st event really opened our eyes," says Karel Schrijver of Lockheed Martin’s Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, CA. "We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before."

For the past three months, Schrijver has been working with fellow Lockheed-Martin solar physicist Alan Title to understand what happened during the "Great Eruption." They had plenty of data: The event was recorded in unprecedented detail by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and twin STEREO spacecraft. With several colleagues present to offer commentary, they outlined their findings at a press conference today at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Explosions on the sun are not localized or isolated events, they announced. Instead, solar activity is interconnected by magnetism over breathtaking distances. Solar flares, tsunamis, coronal mass ejections--they can go off all at once, hundreds of thousands of miles apart, in a dizzyingly-complex concert of mayhem.

[fosborn]

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshots/2010_12_14/
Check out this viewer. It is so cool!

[seasmith]

see Planetary Science
http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum/phpB ... 753#p43753

[freedomrox]

I will let you judge this story upon it's own merits, and save my personal comments for later; other than the fact that Karel Schrijver of Lockheed Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Lab, has taken the first most important step in understanding the nature of the Universe in a smaller scale observation. Sol spoke with a very loud voice testifying to the elctromagnetic forces which rule our reality. Although I doubt that he understands his own conclusions as a whole; I believe it is undeniable once it is admitted that magnetic forces are over-arching and controlling, that it will take little imagination to conclude that magnetic fields can only exist in the presence of electrical activity. Of course, i know many will say, "So what? They will just claim there is a core spinning at light speed within connected to a black hole empowered by an invisible dark energy that in turn provides electricity by shunting it through the 48th dimension as shown by a 500 revolutions per second mega-quasar next to a neutron star that was set into motion by a gravitic explosion 15 billion years ago." (God, i have read too many Space.com articles.) Honestly though, i believe this is a major breakthrough in confirming the EU model. I live for the day that the cosmic Birkeland Current can be measured with a certainty that will confirm the inter-connectivity of all active and inactive plasma bodies.


Global Eruption Rocks the Sun

Dec. 13, 2010: On August 1, 2010, an entire hemisphere of the sun erupted. Filaments of magnetism snapped and exploded, shock waves raced across the stellar surface, billion-ton clouds of hot gas billowed into space. Astronomers knew they had witnessed something big.

It was so big, it may have shattered old ideas about solar activity.

"The August 1st event really opened our eyes," says Karel Schrijver of Lockheed Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, CA. "We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before."

For the past three months, Schrijver has been working with fellow Lockheed-Martin solar physicist Alan Title to understand what happened during the "Great Eruption." They had plenty of data: The event was recorded in unprecedented detail by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and twin STEREO spacecraft. With several colleagues present to offer commentary, they outlined their findings at a press conference today at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Explosions on the sun are not localized or isolated events, they announced. Instead, solar activity is interconnected by magnetism over breathtaking distances. Solar flares, tsunamis, coronal mass ejections--they can go off all at once, hundreds of thousands of miles apart, in a dizzyingly-complex concert of mayhem.
"To predict eruptions we can no longer focus on the magnetic fields of isolated active regions," says Title, "we have to know the surface magnetic field of practically the entire sun."

This revelation increases the work load for space weather forecasters, but it also increases the potential accuracy of their forecasts.

"The whole-sun approach could lead to breakthroughs in predicting solar activity," commented Rodney Viereck of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, CO. "This in turn would provide improved forecasts to our customers such as electric power grid operators and commercial airlines, who could take action to protect their systems and ensure the safety of passengers and crew."

In a paper they prepared for the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR), Schrijver and Title broke down the Great Eruption into more than a dozen significant shock waves, flares, filament eruptions, and CMEs spanning 180 degrees of solar longitude and 28 hours of time. At first it seemed to be a cacophony of disorder until they plotted the events on a map of the sun's magnetic field.

Title describes the Eureka! moment: "We saw that all the events of substantial coronal activity were connected by a wide-ranging system of separatrices, separators, and quasi-separatrix layers." A "separatrix" is a magnetic fault zone where small changes in surrounding plasma currents can set off big electromagnetic storms.

Full Article Here:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... leruption/

Movie here:
http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibr ... uption.mov

[seasmith]

12-28

GEOMAGNETIC STORM:

High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras. During the early hours of Dec. 28th, the sun's magnetic field near Earth tipped south, opening a crack in Earth's magnetosphere. Solar wind poured and sparked a G1-class (Kp=5) geomagnetic storm. Observers are reporting ground currents and intensifying Northern Lights in Scandinavia.

http://spaceweather.com/

[seasmith]

~
The sea-surf temp-anom map (La Nina), corresponding with the solar images above:

“This is one of the strongest La Niña events in the past half century, and will likely persist into the northern hemisphere summer,” says Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/a ... ts-web.pdf

[Dotini]

http://www.suite101.com/content/vast-so ... ry-a327330

Controversy about our understanding of the sun has been fomenting for years. In 1980, solar science researcher, Ralph E. Juergens lamented, “The modern astrophysical concept that ascribes the sun’s energy to thermonuclear reactions deep in the solar interior is contradicted by nearly every observable aspect of the sun.”

Respectfully submitted,
Dotini

[seasmith]

And look who's finally waking up:

"The origins of hot plasma in the solar corona.”

Authors:
B. De Pontieu, S.W. McIntosh, M. Carlsson, V.H Hansteen, T.D. Tarbell, P. Boerner, J. Martinez-Sykora, C.J. Schrijver, A.M. Title.

Publication:
Science, January 7, 2011

The research team focused on spicules, which are fountains of plasma propelled upward from near the surface of the Sun into its outer atmosphere. For decades scientists thought that spicules might be sending heat into the corona. However, following observational research in the 1980s, it was found that spicule plasma did not reach coronal temperatures, and so this line of study largely fell out of vogue.

“Heating of spicules to millions of degrees has never been directly observed, so their role in coronal heating had been dismissed as unlikely,” says Bart De Pontieu, the lead author and a solar physicist at LMSAL.

In 2007, De Pontieu, McIntosh, and their colleagues identified a new class of spicules that moved much faster and were shorter lived than the traditional spicules. These “Type II” spicules shoot upward at high speeds, often in excess of 60 miles per second (100 kilometers per second), before disappearing. The rapid disappearance of these jets suggested that the plasma they carried might get very hot, but direct observational evidence of this process was missing.

mscott@ucar.edu

[allynh]

I'm not sure if this article fits in this thread, but if the sun rising early happened, could it be related to the prior CME rather than climate change.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... ating.html

The sun rises two days early in Greenland, sparking fears that climate change is accelerating
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 4:29 PM on 14th January 2011

The sun over Greenland has risen two days early, baffling scientists and sparking fears that Arctic icecaps are melting faster than previously thought.

Experts say the sun should have risen over the Arctic nation's most westerly town, Ilulissat, yesterday, ending a month-and-a-half of winter darkness.

But for the first time in history light began creeping over the horizon at around 1pm on Tuesday - 48 hours ahead of the usual date of 13 January.

The mysterious sunrise has confused scientists, although it is believed the most likely explanation is that it is down to the lower height of melting icecaps allowing the sun's light to penetrate through earlier.

Climate change? The sun rose in Ilulissat, Greenland, two days early on Tuesday, ending a month-and-a-half of winter darkness. One theory is that melting ice caps have lowered the horizon allowing the sun to shine through earlier

Thomas Posch, of the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Vienna, said that a local change of the horizon was 'by far the most obvious explanation'.

He said as the ice sinks, so to does the horizon, creating the illusion that the sun has risen early.

This theory, based on the gradual decline of Greenland's ice sheet, is backed by recent climate studies.

A report by the World Meteorology Organisation shows that temperatures in Greenland have risen around 3C above average over the last year.

It also reported that December was much warmer than usual with rainfall instead of snow recorded for the first time in Kuujjuaq since records began.

Low horizon: The fishing town of Ilulissat is Greenland's most westerly habitation. Temperatures in Greenland have risen 3C above average over the last year

It has even been suggested that the sun's early appearance could have an astronomical explanation.

But Wolfgang Lenhardt, director of the department of geophysics at the Central Institute for Meteorology in Vienna, scotched this theory.

He said: 'The constellation of the stars has not changed. If that had happened, there would have been an outcry around the world.

'The data of the Earth's axis and Earth's rotation are monitored continuously and meticulously and we would know if that had happened.'

[mharratsc]

High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras. During the early hours of Dec. 28th, the sun's magnetic field near Earth tipped south, opening a crack in Earth's magnetosphere. Solar wind poured and sparked a G1-class (Kp=5) geomagnetic storm. Observers are reporting ground currents and intensifying Northern Lights in Scandinavia.

(Highlight mine)

Physicists, whom profess to study the Earth, the Sun, and concurrently therefore the 'magnetic' fields of each, using words like 'crack' and 'magnetic field' in the same sentence, sigh...

They just cannot bring themselves to admit to the concept that our Sun is a variable star, nor that the Earth has a variable magnetic field... which of course is indicative that it is electromagnetic, and thus would explain every observation and get them pointed in the right direction.

I just cannot bring myself to believe that they do not already understand this. I refuse to allow myself to become a 'conspiracy theorist'... but this simple fact really does make me lean towards the notion that something is really and truly afoot with these guys... :\

[StevenJay]

. . . something is really and truly afoot with these guys... :\

It's simple, really. Behold the power of hypnosis!

[solrey]

I'm not sure if this article fits in this thread, but if the sun rising early happened, could it be related to the prior CME rather than climate change.

Probably doesn't fit the thread and no, not related to either CME's or "global climate disruption" ( is that still the latest catchphrase, it's hard to keep up )

This is a local phenomena likely due to what's called the "Greenland Block" which is an area of high pressure that camps out over the west coast of Greenland when the North Atlantic Oscillation is in a "negative" phase. That causes higher than average temperatures for the region under the blocking high which happens to be nearly centered over Ilulissat. It's been like that for the past two or three winters. Ilulissat is on the coast at the mouth of a fjord, basically at sea level, so it wouldn't take much melt off the top of the ice fields to the north to allow the sun to be visible over the horizon a little early. The trend will probably reverse if the NAO flips to positive for a few winters in a row.

cheers

[fosborn]

ESA JHelioviewer is working again. 1-18-11, avialable. Looks mighty fine.

[seasmith]

3D models of advancing coronal mass ejections (CMEs)


http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibr ... _strip.jpg


http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... b_fullsun/