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Solar storms hit more locally than expected: Current instrument network too sparse, says study
https://phys.org/news/2023-11-solar-storms-locally-current-instrument.html [phys.org]
A new study shows that there is greater local variation in the impact of solar storms on Earth than previously estimated. Researchers show that the effects can vary widely even over distances as small as 100 kilometers. The findings are published in Scientific Reports.
Local changes in the magnetic environment have so far remained largely unexplored due to the sparse magnetometer array in the main observing area. Today, solar storms, or geomagnetic storms, are recorded on average by magnetometers spaced about 400 km apart.
Solar storm effects are caused by fast solar wind streams, which cause large electric currents to flow through the ionosphere of the Earth's auroral region, but the behavior of these currents during storms is still not fully understood. Solar storms also appear as auroras.
Researchers from the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory (SGO) and the Ionospheric Physics Group at the University of Oulu, Finland studied the local magnetic field perturbations in the auroral region during space storms using historical data.
The new study looked at data from a strong solar storm in December 1977 from all 32 stations of the then Scandinavian Magnetometer Array (SMA) network in the Nordic countries, which is denser than the current network, and largely unexplored.
