Here Comes the Sun
Smith's is issuing an Event Risk for Solar Flares (+1) The Solar Cycle 25 reached its lowest level in 2020 and it has started climbing higher in 2021. Forecasts predict the Solar 25 Cycle will peak in 2025.
Research now underway predicts the Sun's activity rises and falls in an 11-year cycle. The forecast for the next solar cycle forecasts it will be the weakest of the last 200 years. The maximum of this next cycle — measured in terms of sunspot number, a standard measure of solar activity level — could be 30 to 50% lower than the most recent one. The results show that the next cycle will start in 2020 and reach its maximum in 2025.
On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space. This coronal mass ejection — an immense cloud of magnetized particles — traveled at over 900 miles per second. The ability to forecast these kinds of events on the Sun is increasingly important as NASA prepares to send humans to the Moon under the Artemis program.
Sunspots are regions on the Sun with magnetic fields thousands of times stronger than the Earth's. Fewer of them at the point of maximum solar activity means fewer dangerous blasts of radiation.
What prompts Smith's Event Risk Alert is the combination of increasing solar activity, the weakness of America's electric transmission system (aka the grid) and the spread of residential/commercial electronics (phones/computers,etc).
The obvious solution is to ground the electric towers, sub-stations, and power transformers. However, copper wire is the preferred method of grounding electric grids, which is often stolen from these facilities and sold as a commodity.
