> SWPC Forecasters have issued G3 (Strong) Geomagnetic Storm Watches for 04-06 October due to a pair of coronal mass ejections that are anticipated to arrive over the course of the next three UTC days. Stay tuned for updates as we monitor this activity!
Holy cow that's an insane website design. So, where exactly do I see the tracking? Is it below the grift of a 3D printed moon? Is it near the ads for casinos. Or maybe the mood rings?
This isn't a bitch about ads. It's I honestly cannot easily find the actual information the site is supposedly hosting.
I spent way too long trying to find basic info before I gave up on that site. The two questions I was hoping to see:
1. When will it be the strongest
2. What latitudes should expect to see auroras.
My 'local' page is [1] which is fairly simple but likely has only the information you're interested in, nothing else and none of that side-scrolling bullshit you need to do to see the forecasts on the https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ page.
That site design is awesome. That level of information density is exactly what makes a good site. The information is right in the front, ads are off to the side. It's basically like a newspaper. Which is great for information.
Weird as in self-hosting? This is what ads should be like instead of 3rd party auction data harvesting non-sense. It's just some people have no concept of couth, or less is more, or self control. There's no stopping bad taste.
They're not using an automated ad service of any kind they have manually put these ads in the source code of their web page. We all see the same ads.
I prefer it, these ads mean something to the people that run the site, they put some effort into putting them there and presumably purchasing the products benefits the organisation in some way.
> these ads mean something to the people that run the site
I wouldn't go that far. They mean something as in somebody was willing to spend money, so this is what they get in return. Just look at the randomness of the types of ads. I doubt there was any "qualifying" of the ads other than did the check clear.
> The solar flare emanated from the sunspot group AR3842, which has made headlines before. On Oct. 1, the same sunspot region fired off a powerful X7.1 solar flare and unleashed a coronal mass ejection (CME) — a plume of plasma and magnetic field — which is currently barreling toward Earth. That incoming CME is expected to hit Earth between Oct. 3 and Oct. 5, possibly triggering widespread auroras.
I actually just saw an aurora for the first time in my life a few months ago in Oregon, where they're hardly ever visible. It was quite a sight. Maybe I'll get to see them again.
As long as you're not in space you should be fine. If you are on the ISS, then you have some other experts you can consult, us randos on HN won't be able to help you much.
More serious answer: No risk for people, not even astronauts based on the current projections for the associated solar radiation storm (beyond the normal increased exposure they get up there). We'll almost certainly all have some trouble with GPS this weekend, and the folks maintaining satellites will have their hands full. Other RF systems will be disrupted at times this weekend.
Yes but you have to be an astronout in the outer space without enough added protection for the increase of radiation. Or maybe some increased exposure for high altitude flights near the poles. Other than that earth's atmosphere would make it that not enough exposure will reach the surface of the earth. Well things would be different for indirect harm because of satellite and signal failures. They could even cause disruption for power grid. But I think most of the protection for these systems in place take solar flares into account. So probably the effects will be minimal.
If we ever colonise Mars, will the colonies be more or less vulnerable to solar flares than Earth? Not that I know anything this subject, but my understanding is that Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, and no magnetosphere. Would that make solar flares more dangerous? Or would the colonists be protected by whatever habitat is protecting them from everything else on Mars?
What about electronic equipment that sits outside the human-habitable zones? Could it be fried by a solar flare that would be relatively harmless on Earth?
It's my understanding that a Carrington event would destroy the bulk of the electrical grid on the side of earth facing the sun at the time. But would be pleased to hear how I'm wrong!
For a couple years I had a process running on a PC without ECC that simply filled a large buffer with a bit pattern that was 50% ones and 50% zeros, and then periodically scanned the buffer for changes. It never found a changed bit.
I used a 2008 Mac Pro at work and a 2009 Mac Pro at home for several years. They had ECC memory. I would periodically check the RAM status and I never saw anything that said an error had been corrected.
For that test with the big buffer I don't remember how big a buffer I used, but I remember my calculations based on the error rate data I could find said that with the size buffer I was using I should have seen a few errors per year.
But I think all the error rate data I found was from servers with a lot of RAM and located in data centers. I wonder if that environment is more prone to RAM errors than the environment of the typical home computer?
A buffer is much too small to catch any errors, unless you dedicate more than half of your installed memory to it.
Typical memory rates for a computer with only 8 to 32 GB of DRAM might be of at most a few errors per year when new. For some aged memory modules, after several years of use, the error rate can increase a lot and it can become noticeable. For myself this has been the main benefit of ECC, the ability to detect early the memory modules that must be replaced to avoid data corruption.
Besides the errors from cosmic radiation, which depend mainly on the altitude of the location, there are also errors caused by electrical noise from the environment. The latter may be more frequent in data centers and in industrial computers.
Memory sizes are constantly growing, as semiconductor feature sizes continue to shrink. It stands to reason that random energetic photons (gamma rays, etc.) have a higher chance of flipping a bit on modern memory than on stuff from 15 years ago.
That's a good world model until it's not. There was an HN article on this some months ago, I can't remember what keywords the title used to find it again though
No warnings on PJM grid dashboard.
Probably not going to be a problem.
[1] https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
> SWPC Forecasters have issued G3 (Strong) Geomagnetic Storm Watches for 04-06 October due to a pair of coronal mass ejections that are anticipated to arrive over the course of the next three UTC days. Stay tuned for updates as we monitor this activity!
https://www.gi.alaska.edu/monitors/aurora-forecast
This isn't a bitch about ads. It's I honestly cannot easily find the actual information the site is supposedly hosting.
The first question is answered by: https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/3-day-forecast (Strongest at Fri 2100-0000 UTC)
https://www.w6rz.net/netscape.png
How do we call the equivalent of steam-pubk aesthetics but where tech has stopped on pixel art instead of steam?
[1] https://www.sws.bom.gov.au/
I prefer it, these ads mean something to the people that run the site, they put some effort into putting them there and presumably purchasing the products benefits the organisation in some way.
They also have a no AI disclaimer at the top.
I wouldn't go that far. They mean something as in somebody was willing to spend money, so this is what they get in return. Just look at the randomness of the types of ads. I doubt there was any "qualifying" of the ads other than did the check clear.
I actually just saw an aurora for the first time in my life a few months ago in Oregon, where they're hardly ever visible. It was quite a sight. Maybe I'll get to see them again.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
More serious answer: No risk for people, not even astronauts based on the current projections for the associated solar radiation storm (beyond the normal increased exposure they get up there). We'll almost certainly all have some trouble with GPS this weekend, and the folks maintaining satellites will have their hands full. Other RF systems will be disrupted at times this weekend.
and then he did it anyway
What about electronic equipment that sits outside the human-habitable zones? Could it be fried by a solar flare that would be relatively harmless on Earth?
I used a 2008 Mac Pro at work and a 2009 Mac Pro at home for several years. They had ECC memory. I would periodically check the RAM status and I never saw anything that said an error had been corrected.
For that test with the big buffer I don't remember how big a buffer I used, but I remember my calculations based on the error rate data I could find said that with the size buffer I was using I should have seen a few errors per year.
But I think all the error rate data I found was from servers with a lot of RAM and located in data centers. I wonder if that environment is more prone to RAM errors than the environment of the typical home computer?
Typical memory rates for a computer with only 8 to 32 GB of DRAM might be of at most a few errors per year when new. For some aged memory modules, after several years of use, the error rate can increase a lot and it can become noticeable. For myself this has been the main benefit of ECC, the ability to detect early the memory modules that must be replaced to avoid data corruption.
Besides the errors from cosmic radiation, which depend mainly on the altitude of the location, there are also errors caused by electrical noise from the environment. The latter may be more frequent in data centers and in industrial computers.
https://xkcd.com/2979/