This
video taken by SDO in extreme ultraviolet light shows the M9.3-class
solar flare and cme generated by sunspot 1261 early on August 4, 2011.
Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA
What is a solar flare? What is a CME? Explanatory video
Credit: NASA/Goddard/S. Wiessinger
Credit: NASA/Goddard/S. Wiessinger
The first video above is to get an idea of how a solar explosion may look like, the second video is an explanatory video that will make it easier for new readers of this blog to understand the sequence of events that we are going to describe next. We thank NASA for all the data, images, videos and charts that it makes available to researchers and interested people.
SEQUENCE OF EVENTS
On
August 2 2011 at 0619 UT a magnetic fields above Sunspot 1261 produced a
M1-class solar flare: the blast hurled a coronal mass ejection
(CME) almost directly toward the Earth initially forcasted to hit
on August 5 On August 3, 2011at 9:43 am EDT Sunspot 1261 unleashed another strong solar flare: this time around an M6.0-class flare propelling a CME in the general direction of Earth forcasted to hit on August 5 .
Scientist forecasted that traveling 900 km/s the CME of August 2 should reach Earth on August 5th at 0300 UT plus or minus 7 hours ehilr the cloud produced by August 3 M-flare may be right behind it;
On August 4 2011 for the third day in a row, active sunspot 1261 unleashed a significant M-class solar flare. The latest blast at 03.57 UT on August 4th registered M9.3 on the Richter Scale of Flares, almost crossing the threshold into X-territory (X-flares are the most powerful kind). The number of energetic protons around Earth has jumped nearly 100-fold as a result of this event.
The latest eruption propelled a bright coronal mass ejection (CME) toward Earth (CMEs
are solar phenomenons that can send solar particles hurling into space
at high rates of speed, sometimes affect electronic systems in
satellites and on the ground): travelling at approximately 1950
km/s, this M9.3 CME was expected to sweep up two earlier CMEs already
en route. Analysts at the GSFC Space Weather Lab said the combined cloud
should reach Earth on August 5th at 13:55 UT plus or minus 7 hours: "
The
initial August 2 coronal mass ejection (CME) arrived at Earth August 4
around 5 pm EDT. The two August 3 and August 4 CMEs combined, arrived at
Earth on August 5 around 1:20 pm EDT, resulting in a strong compression
of the magnetosphere: a major geomagnetic storm was produced following the impact of a CME on August 5th around 1800 UT.
The M9-class solar flare of August 4th produced a burst of shortwave static so powerful that receivers on Earth picked it upafter sunset: a very rare event once described by pioneering radio astronomers Alex Smith and Tom Carr. They considered the possibility that solar radio waves might have been reflected by the Moon or carried to the night side of Earth by ionospheric ducting (copy of their their paper here) .
The
CME stirke on Earth's magnetic field on August 5th that produced one of
the strongest geomagnetic storms in years. Registering 8 on the 0 to 9
"K-index" scale of magnetic disturbances, the storm at maximum sparked
auroras across Europe and in many northern-tier US states. 
The M9-class solar flare of August 4th produced a burst of shortwave static so powerful that receivers on Earth picked it upafter sunset: a very rare event once described by pioneering radio astronomers Alex Smith and Tom Carr. They considered the possibility that solar radio waves might have been reflected by the Moon or carried to the night side of Earth by ionospheric ducting (copy of their their paper here) .
Now that we have the sequence of events reconstructed, let's take a look at the markets those days....using intraday ES futures charts:
August 3, 2011
August 5, 2011
August 3 to August 7, 2011 Stock Market crash
On Aug. 2, President Barack Obama signed a bill to raise the
On August 5, Standard and Poor's downgraded the
During
those days traders were still nervous for
the frustrating debt limit debate taking place in Washington
and growing concerned for the slowing economy during Q3....the
geomagnetic storm could have not hit at a worse time: by looking at the
above charts it seems that each CME coming from the Sun resulted into a
sequence of selling/panic waves on the market. Many have already tried
to explain the effect of Geomagnetic storms on the human Psyche, we
have been monitoring the effects of geomagnetic storms on the markets
for years, and in this blog we have created a dedicated section "The Solar Wind Monitor" to keep track of the Solar Activity thanks to the data provided by NASA. In my latest book The Sky Watching Trader published in May 2011 I have tried to provide some tentative explanation of this phenomena.
Probably after the august 2011 Stock
Market Crash the link between geomagnetic storms and the
human psyche will draw more attention and that will probably
help us to find more explanations, at least these things will no longer
(hopefully) classified as astrological non sense: there is a whole
new scientific field to be explored here.
