NOAA scientist finds clue to predicting solar flares

Alysha Reinard, a solar physicist at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center has found a new technique for predicting solar flares.

For decades, experts have searched for signs in the sun that could lead to more accurate forecasts of solar flares — powerful blasts of energy that can supercharge Earth’s upper atmosphere and disrupt satellites and the land-based technologies on which modern societies depend.

Now a scientist at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center and her colleagues have found a technique for predicting solar flares two to three days in advance with unprecedented accuracy.

The long-sought clue to prediction lies in changes in twisting magnetic fields beneath the surface of the sun in the days leading up to a flare, according to the authors. The findings will be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters next month.

“For the first time, we can tell two to three days in advance when and where a solar flare will occur and how large it will be,” said lead author Alysha Reinard, a solar physicist at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center and the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences, a partnership between NOAA and the University of Colorado.

The new technique is already twice as accurate as current methods, according to the authors, and that number is expected to improve as they refine their work over the next few years. With this technique, reliable watches and warnings should be possible before the next solar sunspot maximum, predicted to occur in 2013.

Currently, forecasters see complex sunspot regions and issue alerts that a large flare may erupt, but the when-and-where eludes them.

Read the full story at
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/
20100119_solarflare.html

Thanks to George Boorer ZL3PN for spotting this