The Morrison Planetarium’s monthly Earth Update, a monthly “Science Tonight, Live@630” presentation at NightLife, takes visitors on an immersive trip around the world examining current events on our blue planet—including climate, weather, seismic activity and more. The tour is created and navigated by Tim Horn, our producer of climate and earth science visualization and presented by our expert planetarium presenter, Josh Roberts.

We like to follow up with an article here, with a summary of the latest earthly news that we discussed in the dome.

This month, Josh and Tim started at the Sun.  On the last day of August, a coronal mass, a long filament of charged particles trapped in the Sun’s magnetosphere, was ejected into space at a speed of over 900 miles per second!  Luckily it didn’t travel directly toward Earth. Similar coronal mass ejections can head toward us, however, which makes them well worth studying.

Leaving the Sun, Josh and Tim returned to our planet, with images courtesy of the NASA Earth Observatory.  This year, the National Climatic Data Center reported the hottest July on record in the contiguous United States.

Check out this natural-color image of Hurricane Isaac over Louisiana on August 29 from NASA’s Terra satellite.  Within several hours of this photo, the hurricane was downgraded to a tropical storm.  Issac claimed five lives, but the storm also brought beneficial rains to parts of the drought-stricken Midwest.

Speaking of drought… In July, the US Drought Monitor announced that over 53% of the country suffered in moderate drought or worse.

The remnants of Isaac eased the dryness dramatically in Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Louisiana, while rains also moistened states in the mid-Atlantic and Southeast.

But to the west, 100-degree-plus temperatures and a continued lack of precipitation pushed Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, Kansas and the Dakotas deeper into drought. Wyoming and Montana also got drier.

Looking at the western United States, we viewed another natural-color image showing several wildfires.  That image, from the Aqua satellite, was taken on August 12.

But it’s not all doom and gloom.  The recent earthquake in Costa Rica caused “remarkably little” damage. If you’ve visited the Academy’s new Earthquake exhibit and seen our planetarium show, you know that preparedness plays a key role in people’s and communities’ abilities to cope with an earthquake. And societies prepare for earthquakes by building resilient infrastructure.  Strict building codes, similar to those of California and Japan, helped Costa Rica stay intact, despite the 7.6 magnitude quake. The Boy Scouts were right,  “Be Prepared.”

Join us next month for more Earth Update!

Kathi Koontz is production coordinator for the Worldviews Network here at the Academy. She works with planetariums across the country to display immersive science visualizations on local environmental topics.  They partner with local non-profits and NGOs to share what they are doing and inspire action.

An international panel, speaking about solar storms at the recent AAAS Meeting, began their presentation by saying, “Don’t panic.”

Despite the fact that the sun is increasing its activity and will enter the solar maximum in 2013, space weather technology and satellites are improving so that solar storms will be easier to predict and prepare for.

Sunspots appear leading to and during the solar maximum and can erupt into solar flares or coronal mass ejections that can cause geomagnetic storms here on Earth– affecting radio communications, GPS signals, and radar systems. They can even knock out power grids and destroy satellites.

There are eleven space weather centers around the world that track these storms. These centers originated in the 1940s, during World War II. They provide an early warning system of coming storms to governments, airlines, power companies, cellphone providers and other clients. Similar to hurricanes and other Earth-originated storms, they have a measuring system to track the severity of solar storms. You can see the categories here.

With the STEREO satellites and SDO now constantly watching the sun, storms can be tracked across its entire globe, giving the space weather centers a head start. Depending on the type of storm, it can take hours or days for the effects to reach Earth.

Two weeks ago, a large solar flare captured by SDO allowed scientists to warn airlines to re-route flights away from the poles, where the effects are felt most. SDO also captured an amazing flare last Thursday. Since the flare occurred away from Earth, no storms will reach us currently. However as sunspot 1163 (the origination of the flare) turns towards Earth, we could get hit, according to SpaceWeather.com.

NOAA, working with FEMA and other government agencies, is getting better at modeling possible severe solar storm scenarios and trying to, through conferences like these, raise awareness, not incite panic.

Image: SDO/NASA

According to Universe Today:

There was a C3-class solar flare, a solar tsunami, multiple filaments of magnetism lifting off the stellar surface, large-scale shaking of the solar corona, radio bursts, a coronal mass ejection (CME) and more.

(In a separate, very recent post, Universe Today reported that there are actually four CMEs.)

Solar scientists are thrilled! “This has been an unusually quiet solar cycle,”(Universe Today) and the sun is just now waking up, heading for its solar max in May 2013.

This “awesome solar phenomena”(Wired) is also good news for us non-scientists. Wired reports that:

The event also caused a coronal mass ejection to head directly toward earth, which may mean people in the northern latitudes will be treated to auroras around August 3.

Can’t solar flares also mean trouble? This one isn’t big enough. According to MSNBC:

The X-ray blast rated a C3 on the Space Weather Prediction Center’s scale, which suggests there’ll be no disruption for power grids, satellites, astronauts on the International Space Station or navigation services on airplanes.

So depending on your location (San Francisco seems too far south in the current NOAA POES satellite image), sit back, take a look at the skies tonight and tomorrow and enjoy the pretty picture show. (Universe Today has just posted possible times of the auroras.)  And even if you can’t see the auroras, you can see SDO’s amazing video of the activity here or here.

Image: NASA/SDO

One researcher has looked for clues to solar weather in the meridional flow, which moves from the solar equator toward the poles, and which seems to change speed during the shifting solar cycle. Another looked at the solar “jet stream,” a slow current that originates at solar midlatitudes and pushes in a bifurcated stream toward both the equator and the poles. Another scientist examined the inner workings of the sun through the oscillation of sound waves propagating through the solar interior; yet another looked at magnetic maps to chart the shifting flux across the sun.

(This quote is thanks to Scientific American.)

In other words, we still have a lot to learn about our very own star.

In fact, in 1997, NASA’S Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) imaged the eruption of an active region on the surface of the Sun that resulted in a coronal mass ejection (CME).

Such an eruption is a gigantic belch of charged particles and radiation that, when they reach Earth, can cause disruptions in radio transmission, power outages, and luminous atmospheric displays known as the auroras.

At the same time, SOHO also captured what looked like a shock wave that radiated out from the eruption along the Sun’s surface, like a tsunami.  Solar scientists weren’t quite sure what this apparent “solar tsunami” was – were they witnessing actual wave propagation or just seeing the shadow of the ejected material?

None of SOHO’s subsequent images shed enough light on the phenomenon to answer the question, but last fall, the twin spacecraft of NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) imaged a solar eruption from two different angles simultaneously, establishing that what was observed in 1997 was indeed a shock wave that interacted with other features on the Sun – in one instance causing a solar prominence to wave like a flag in the wind.

Studies of this “fast-mode magnetohydrodynamical waves,” as they’re now known, indicate that they tower above the surrounding surface to a height more than a half-dozen times Earth’s diameter, rippling outward at half a million miles per hour.  Analysis of the behavior of these waves can help determine the structure of the Sun’s lower atmosphere and pinpoint the exact location of the solar flares that emit CMEs.  Knowing that, scientists are better able to tell whether or not CMEs may be aimed toward Earth and anticipate any effects from them.

Image: A solar tsunami seen by the STEREO spacecraft