Are We Ready for a Solar Katrina?

April 21, 2009— -- More than a million people without power. The distribution of drinkable water disrupted. Transportation, communication and banking upset. Trillions of dollars in damage.

Hurricanes, blizzards and other earthly tempests aren't the only natural forces with the potential to sow catastrophe.

Severe weather in the sun's outer atmosphere could knock out much of the country's power grid, incapacitate navigational systems and jeopardize spacecraft, scientists say.

While the odds of a solar disaster are relatively small, scientists warn that we need to ramp up our defenses against solar storms, especially given our increasing dependence on technology that is so susceptible to radiation from the sun.

"It's one of those events that is of low probability but high consequence," Dr. Roberta Balstad, a research scientist with Columbia University's Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. "The consequences could be extreme."

And Balstad and her colleagues emphasize that we've seen those extreme consequences before.

In 1859, a solar storm, also known as the Carrington event (after the astronomer Richard Carrington, who first recognized the cause) fried the telegraph system.

Another powerful space weather event in 1989 caused a blackout in Quebec, Canada. Other storms have led to diverted airplanes and impaired telecommunications satellites.

Earlier this year, a group of experts from around the country, including Balstad, issued a report to the National Academies of Sciences on the economic and social impacts of solar storms.

The point of the report was to raise awareness and encourage the government and private businesses to prepare for the long-term consequences of a major event.

"We tend to think that we're in control of nature, but we're not," she said. "What we need to pay attention to is our total dependence in all parts of lives on the electric grid, which is vulnerable. ... If there is some kind of disruption, we need to be ready to deal with it."

In the face of a "space weather" Katrina, she said we wouldn't be prepared.

The direct result of a space storm would be the breakdown of the electrical grid, the report warned.

John Kappenman, an analyst with Metatech Corporation, a company that studies the effect of electromagnetic interference on power systems, said in the report that damaged transformers take a long time to repair.