Solar storm activity increasing
While hardly matching the disastrous scope of this past week’s worst flooding in 16 years in Western Washington, the Inland Northwest had its share of weather-related problems.
Winds up to 65 mph led to widespread power failures. A wet November has flooded many basements. Numerous trees have been uprooted.
A new problem is emerging that may ultimately affect satellite television and communications, cell phone service and perhaps electric power over the next few years. Many folks have noticed that network television programming through national satellite providers has occasionally gone snowy or their cell phone service has been experiencing dropped calls.
At least part of the blame goes to the sun. It’s becoming mighty active – a satellite operator’s celestial nightmare.
Nearly everything that happens on our nearest star affects our planet. There are actually two kinds of explosive solar events. One is the solar flare and the other involves a massive CME, or coronal mass ejection, in which billions of tons of charged particles escape from the sun’s halo, the corona, speeding toward Earth. These are called sunspots.
When these gigantic solar clouds slam into the Earth’s atmosphere, they often squash our planet’s magnetic field lines while dumping trillions of watts of electrical power on us that overloads our systems, causing huge blackouts. Any satellite in Earth’s orbit may likewise see its delicate instruments damaged or destroyed.
A new computer model now suggests that even worse solar storms containing both solar flares and CMEs may arrive as soon as the end of next year or early in 2008. These sun bursts may not peak until around 2012. It’s possible that we will see a mega storm even more intense than the magnetic solar blast of 1989 that shut down a major power company in northeastern Canada, producing widespread blackouts.
Long-range weather outlook
Since Nov. 1, more than 2 1/2 inches of rain has fallen at the Spokane International and the Spokane Valley and more than 4 1/2 inches of precipitation has been measured in Coeur d’Alene. The normal for the entire month of November is 2.08 inches at the airport, 2.15 inches in the Spokane Valley and 2.97 inches in Coeur d’Alene.
I still see lots of snow above 4,000 feet for skiers and snowboarders. But, due to the warm, wet and now “moderate” El Niño in the Pacific Ocean, much of the precipitation is expected to fall as rain, below 2,500 feet.
What snow does fall in the lowlands will tend to melt off quickly, at least until the Pineapple Express finally shifts southward into California allowing a colder and drier weather pattern to return to our part of the country by sometime probably in early December, possibly just after Thanksgiving.
Next month, we should see some snow shower activity in the lower elevations as we’ll be on the northern and colder portion of Pacific storm systems. It still looks like January will be our coldest and snowiest month of the season.