A new tool for forecasting flares may soon be available to scientists, one that promises to be twice as accurate as current models. The new technique analyzes sound waves generated by magnetized fluids swirling inside the sun.

Forecasting a solar flare is a bit like predicting the path of a tornado: It's a lot easier once it makes an appearance.

Yet early warning is crucial. Solar flares can trigger disruptions and errors in GPS signals and other equipment receiving radio waves that bounce off or travel through the ionosphere — the layer of charged particles surrounding Earth's atmosphere that gets kicked up by solar activity.

That's a concern for activities requiring precision navigation, such as landing planes. Solar flares can even affect power grids on Earth.

"You get this faster, twisting motion that then slows down to almost nothing and then the flare. It tells us how big the flare is going to be and that it's coming — maybe a day or two in advance," said Alysha Reinard, a solar physicist with NOAA in Boulder, Colo.

 Source : MSNBC

Reinard and colleagues used archived solar seismic data collected by ground stations to look for correlations between motions in the magnetic fields and subsequent flares. Analysis showed a pattern, and using it, the team accurately predicted up to half the flares that occurred between 2001 and 2007, the years the seismic data was available.

"That's quite a bit higher that people had done before. The forecasting group is pretty excited about this," Reinard said. "Hopefully we can get to a stage where it's operational soon."

Thomas Bogdan, who heads NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, says forecasting flares is probably his team's most difficult challenge because the highly energized, magnetized photons released during a solar flare move at the speed of light, making the 193-million-mile journey to Earth in just eight minutes.

"When it's here, it's here. There's no way to get any more advanced knowledge," Bogdan told Discovery News.

Current forecasting models rely heavily on comparing observations of the sun's active regions with historical data. Forecasters then issue probabilities, similar to hurricane warnings, that a flare of a certain magnitude will occur within 72, 48 and 24 hours.

"What we currently do now is the best that's out there, but it's pretty archaic," Bogdan said.

Reinard's research will be published in this month's Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The new SDO spacecraft is in a circularized geosynchronous orbit at about 22,300 miles. From that altitude, the spacecraft will relay the readings instantly to a ground station in New Mexico. The research is expected to reveal the sun's inner workings by constantly taking high resolution images, collecting readings from inside the sun and measuring its magnetic field activity. 

This data is expected to give researchers the insight they need to eventually predict solar storms and other activity on the sun that can affect spacecraft in orbit, astronauts on the International Space Station and electronic and other systems on Earth. 

Solar flares rise and fall on an 11-year cycle, and last year marked what scientists thought was the solar minimum. Through the beginning of 2009, the sun stayed unusually quiet, but all that changed, when a major sunspot appeared on the backside of the sun, where it was captured by NASA’s STEREO instrument.

Just as earthquakes can set off huge tsunami waves on the surface of our oceans, a coronal mass ejection or flare can cause a tsunami on the Sun's surface—and it did on May 19, 2007. 

The waves generated by the explosions can travel at over a million kilometers per hour. The event was captured by NASA's twin Stereo spacecraft and was observed by a team at Trinity College, Dublin. The event lasted for about 35 minutes and ultimately covered almost the full disk of the Sun. 

The energy released in these explosions is phenomenal, about two billion times the annual world energy consumption in just a fraction of a second. A previous observation of a solar tsunami was recorded by the SOHO spacecraft almost a decade ago but these images were misleading to scientists.

Theorists were unable to match the anticipated behaviors of the tsunami to the observation because theory suggested that the solar tsunamis would travel much faster than observed. According to their calculations, tsunamis on the Sun should have had phenomenal speed due to the influence of the Sun's magnetic field on the solar material—making the waves magneto-acoustical in nature. 

With the improved capabilities of the Stereo's Extreme Ultraviolent Imager (EUVI) instruments they in fact measured speeds in agreement with the theory. In addition, by monitoring the Sun at four wavelengths which penetrate different layers of the Sun's atmosphere, astronomers could see how the wave moved vertically as well as horizontally.

 “We were able to show for the first time that this wave actually propagates almost all the way from the surface of the Sun to high up in the Sun's atmosphere,” said Dr. Gallagher. The researchers even saw the pressure wave reflect and refract off different regions of the Sun's atmosphere exactly as Earth's tsunami's do as they crash against land. 

a rogue flare, a solar tsunami of 100 times a normal flare would release the energy equivalent of billions of hydrogen bombs and spew into space hundred of billions of tons of murderous gamma rays that could overwhelm the natural defenses of the Earth's magnetosphere and atmosphere and zap all living creatures in its path. And mostly the most fascinating fact about this gruesome scenario is that it would leave no, zero, trace in history.

The solar cycle, or the solar magnetic activity cycle, is the dynamical engine and energy source behind all solar phenomena driving space weather. 

“This recent sunspot activity is like the first robin of spring,” said solar physicist Douglas Biesecker of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. “In this case, it’s an early omen of solar storms that will gradually increase over the next few years.”

As for “real life consequences,” a high period of solar activity – expected during the solar cycles peak in 2011/12 – plays havoc with much of the electrical equipment here on Earth. GPS signals, power grids, cell phones, civilian and airline communications, military communications and a whole lot more are just waiting to fritz out due to increased solar activity.

An example of such an outage came in 1989, in Canada’s province of Quebec, when thanks to a major solar storm, the entire provinces power-grid was knocked offline.

“Our growing dependence on highly sophisticated, space-based technologies means we are far more vulnerable to space weather today than in the past,” said Vice Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Jr., undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. “NOAA’s space weather monitoring and forecasts are critical for the nation’s ability to function smoothly during solar disturbances.”

The only reason that Earth experiences these issues though is due to the increased activity, during what is called a Solar Maximum. The rest of the time, our planet’s magnetic field protects us from the odd solar burp.

On January 20th, 2005... a giant sunspot named "NOAA 720" exploded. The blast sparked an X-class solar flare, the most powerful kind, and hurled a billion-ton cloud of electrified gas (a "coronal mass ejection") into space. Solar protons accelerated to nearly light speed by the explosion reached the Earth-Moon system minutes after the flare--the beginning of a days-long "proton storm."

"The Moon is totally exposed to solar flares," explains solar physicist David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center. "It has no atmosphere or magnetic field to deflect radiation." Protons rushing at the Moon simply hit the ground--or whoever might be walking around outside.

"An astronaut caught outside when the storm hit would've gotten sick," says Francis Cucinotta, NASA's radiation health officer at the Johnson Space Center. At first, he'd feel fine, but a few days later symptoms of radiation sickness would appear: vomiting, fatigue, low blood counts. These symptoms might persist for days.

On Earth, no one suffered because the planet's thick atmosphere and magnetic field protects us from protons and other forms of solar radiation. In fact, the storm was good. When the plodding coronal mass ejection arrived 36 hours later and hit Earth's magnetic field, sky watchers in Europe saw the brightest and most stunning auroras in years.

But a rogue solar flare tsunami might  be a different story:

Since we've only been tracking solar flares since the beginning of the Space Age, we have no real idea of how massive solar flares can become. A solar flare occurs when magnetic energy that has built up in the solar atmosphere is suddenly released. Radiation is emitted across virtually the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves at the long wavelength end, through optical emission to x-rays and gamma rays at the short wavelength end. The amount of energy released from a single flare is the equivalent of millions of 100-megaton hydrogen bombs exploding simultaneously!

With a natural cycle averaging out at approximately 11 years, the sun is typically a storm of flares and sun-spots the size of planets, causing electromagnetic havoc and radiation problems within its sphere of influence. That influence can reach all the way to earth, and will often trouble astronauts who have to deal with the heightened levels of radiation as they patrol the skies.

Posted by Casey Kazan with Dr. Chandra Walker 

Source Links: http://www.physics.tcd.ie/Astrophysics/tsunami/ http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/stereoimages/195SolarTsunami.shtml http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7326097.stm http://nam2008.qub.ac.uk/press/2008-15-

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/main/index.html