Solar Radiation Event Now ranks highest since Halloween 2003

'Space hurricane' from the sun sweeping over our planet

The storm began when a powerful solar flare erupted on the sun Monday, blasting a stream of charged particles toward our planet. This electromagnetic burst — called a coronal mass ejection, or CME — started hitting Earth somewhere around 10 a.m. ET Tuesday, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center.

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Experts at the center said that solar radiation levels were at their highest point since the Halloween storms of 2003. Earlier estimates ranked the storm as the strongest since 2005 in terms of solar radiation, but Terry Onsager, a physicist at the Space Weather Prediction Center, said that when the wave of charged particles arrived, "that took it from below the 2005 event to above the 2005 event."
Bill Murtagh, the center's program coordinator, said that the outburst was forcing airlines to change routes for some of their scheduled flights. "Most of the major airlines flying polar [routes], or even some non-polar, high-altitude routes, have taken action to mitigate the effect of this storm," he told msnbc.com. end quote.

Since this seems to be only the beginning of a very active Solar Event Season peaking in 2013 it should be an interesting couple of years.