Extreme Magnetic Fluctuations of the G5 Geomagnetic Storm – Full Analysis

How did Earth’s magnetic field respond to the machine gun of CMEs that the Sun sent our way? Could we take another G5 impact like this? Let’s look at the data and compare it to the great geomagnetic storms of 1989 and 2003!

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Data:
Intermagnet https://imag-data.bgs.ac.uk/GIN_V1/GINForms2
Realtime Dst https://wdc.kugi.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dst_realtime/presentmonth/index.html
Kp-Hp30-Hp60 Index https://kp.gfz-potsdam.de/en/hp30-hp60

Credit:
NASA
NOAA
WDC Center for Geomagnetism – Kyoto
GFZ Helmholtz-Zentrum Potsdam

#spaceweather #space #geophysics #geomagneticstorm #ascension #solarcycle25 #solarflares #coronalmassejections

it’s been an absolutely crazy few days recently we just got out of that G5 geomagnetic storm one of the strongest geomagnetic storms in recent history comparable to the Halloween storms of 2003 the November 20th and 21st 2003 geomagnetic storm and also the March 1989 geomagnetic storm there were a war sightings all the way down to Puerto Rico even Hawaii so this was really a quite phenomenal event and with these types of big events you get really Sensational claims specifically about Earth’s magnetic field and how it’s weakening undergoing different changes pull shift things of that nature so I would like to take this storm as an opportunity to look to see what actually happened to Earth’s magnetic field during this storm because we have a whole bunch of different ways of looking at Earth’s magnetic field different indices we can actually look at Earth’s total magnetic field strength across different observatories on the ground surface and more so we’re going to dive into the data with this video uh before that though if you really like to learn about Earth’s magnetic field from its generation and to its propagation through space and how it interacts with space weather solar wind things of that nature its Evolution across time with geomagnetic excursions and reversals then I have a complete guide a earth magnetic field Master guide available for you it’s a 2hour lecture and I feel like I should mention this at the beginning because it really is the foundation if you really want to understand this data that I’m going to go through that would be an excellent place to start first and then going into this you’ll really understand what I’m talking about and you’ll understand some of the nuances in regards to this discussion about Earth magnetic field that a lot of people gloss over and a lot of people miss so that is the place to start I’ll put a link in the video description that is available on gumroad for $5.99 or you can sign up as a special Channel member and get access to that ad free through this YouTube channel with that let’s Dive Right In we will start with our most basic measure of geomagnetic activity the KP index and then we’ll look at the DST index and then we’ll finish by looking at the total magnetic field strength as recorded at different ground observatories around the world we’ll begin with our most basic measure of geomagnetic activity which is our KP Index this is a 3our measure of geomagnetic activity based on different groundbased magnetic observatories and the measurements that they then bring together into this 0 through n measure so nine is the highest value Zer is the lowest zero is absolutely quiet conditions the dial variations are only about 50 nanotesla sometimes even less whereas with a extreme G5 geomagnetic storm like you get with a KP index of the magnetic field fluctuations can be greater than 1,000 nanotesla so quite a big difference so here we’re looking at our KP index from uh May 4th all the way to today May 14th we see that we had basically normal conditions we did have a G1 storm for 3 hours here on the six we see this KP index of 5.33 but in general most of these values are below two so Earth’s magnetic field was stable there weren’t that many uh fluctuations occurring and overall everything was quiet and calm but when the first of those six CMEs came in you know three of them actually combined we suspect then the KP index shot up dramatically on the 10th of May they also came in sooner than expected and the KP index went to a value of eight almost immediately which is a G4 storm and then six hours later we’re at a value of nine which is a g five stormm and the KP index is capped at nine but there are other indices like the HP index that’s a 30 minute or 1H hour measure of geomagnetic activity which is not uh capped at nine and those went over 10 and 11 so really quite a significant storm that we just experienced it was 39 hours this big red block here is 39 hours of KP indices over six and it was 30 hours where the KP index was over eight so from here to here the KP index was eight or greater we also had this second part of the storm there on the 13th of May when uh a different Halo CME arrived and it did Spike the KP up above six uh and in that six range but in general this was the main phase of the storm that triggered Aurora all the way down to places like Puerto Rico and Hawaii and that’s what makes this storm really in the same class as the Halloween storms of 2003 and also the March 1989 geomagnetic storm so this is our most basic measure of looking at the qualities of a geomagnetic storm and the disturbances to Earth’s magnetic field we can also look at the DST index and we can look at Earth’s actual magnetic field strength across variety of locations to get a really high resolution sense of what happened to Earth’s magnetic field but before that let’s learn a little bit about how Earth’s magnetic field undergoes these extreme changes during solar wind and space weather impacts so we can better understand the Dynamics at play the KP index is measuring Earth’s magnetic field changes across space and time but it’s important to note that what’s causing these changes is Earth’s plasmasphere so contained within Earth’s magnetosphere are distinct populations of plasma ions the three most distinct and well studied populations are the radiation belts the ring current in the plasma sheet slf flux tube of the Magneto tail here we see a graphic of the radiation belts you can see their proximity to the planet they go from about 1.5 to 9 Earth radi out here we see them at high charge here we see them at low charge this is Earth’s ring current system it’s it’s basically a giant electric current in the equatorial regions going out in the same range as the radiation belts from about 1.5 to 9 Earth radi there’s an inner counterclockwise electron current and then there’s two proton ring currents that go clockwise so we have an inner and then an outer the outer one it’s hypothesized to split into two due to solar forcing and so it is this flow here of the proton ring current that contributes to the decrease in Earth magnetic field strength in the equatorial regions and and so it’s an enhancement of the Ring current which causes Earth’s magnetic field strength to undergo very large swings during GE Magnetic storms you also have the Magneto tail and there’s a lot of Highly charged ions there a lot of them get pushed out sent out the Magneto tail ejected out of the Magneto Tail as plasmoids though some of them will be triggered in reconnection events and stream into the polar cus and those are some of the ions that we’ll see during things like aurora borealis or Aurora Australis which would be you know the Northern or the Southern Lights so Earth’s magnetosphere acts as a particle accelerator a lot of these ions coming in from the solar wind and cronal mass ejections or plasma filaments that impact the Earth they will enter into Earth’s magnetosphere and then get trapped in Earth’s magnetosphere and be accelerated to relativistic speeds and then when those ions are moving around that is what causes these changes in Earth magnetic field because these ions such as protons and electrons they all carry a charge protons are positively charged electrons are negatively charged and therefore their movement causes a force disturbance in the magnetic field when a large group or wave of plasma these are combined collectively they’re known as plasma the fourth state of matter so when there’s a large movement of plasma within the magnetosphere it can trigger significant changes to Earth’s magnetic field at that space and at that time most notably the flow of Earth’s ring current is enhanced during a geomagnetic storm and this reduces the strength of Earth’s magnetic field especially at the equatorial region so when you have these ions moving around they form very powerful electric currents if we go back we see ard’s law here an electric current creates a magnetic field around it here we have our wire this is just an illustration the current is flowing this way and we see the magnetic field being formed like that uh you can know the direction of the magnetic field using the right hand rule so you can research into that if you’d like uh so we have these currents flowing in Earth’s magnetosphere this is the plasmasphere there there’s no wires up there but nevertheless you have these very powerful electric currents that are flowing creating these magnetic fields which can be constructive or deconstructive to Earth’s magnetic field depending on the component Direction depending on the XYZ vectors that all is what influences the swings and Earth’s magnetic field strength and then you can also have these currents in the plasmasphere cancel each other out so you don’t really see too many changes it’s a very Dynamic place across space and time and so our KP index is a pretty simplified measure of what’s actually happening up there in the plasmasphere and then those magnetic field changes Ripple reverse ver verberate all the way down to the surface as we can measure we can also measure them up in the near Earth environment uh using various satellite platforms it’s also important to to learn a little bit about the ring current before we move on to the DST index which is a really good way of measuring the strength of a geomagnetic storm because that’s based on the ring current so here we have our inner proton our outer proton ring current they go clockwise we have the electron oneand counterclockwise and what happens during geomagnetic storms is you have o oxygen ions from the upper atmosphere actually increase in their uh charge and in their vibration and then they move up into the proton ring current they are positively charged enhancing the positively charged ring current around the earth and that contributes to a further decrease in Earth’s magnetic field strength for a temporary length of time this is typically 24 to 48 hours it depends on the strength of the geomagnetic storm a very strong geomagnetic storm can have that ring current stay enhanced for days and that’s what we’re seeing right now after that G5 geomagnetic storm so you can look at the groundbased magnetic field observations with the KP index and a very simple way you can look at those magnetic field observations directly which we will do at the end of this video and then you can also look at the DST index so let’s look at the DST index now and let’s look at the DST index for this G5 in May 2024 as compared to 2003 in 1989 on the left we have our DST indices for 1989 2003 in 2024 and we can specifically look at the storms just to start though you’ll see these traces here the only reason they have different colors is so you can separate them easily from each other so January here February of 1989 March is when that very powerful storm came in in 1989 and so we can actually zoom in here and see the really precipitous drop of the DST index and then it took a while to recover and eventually it came back you do see some other storms that came in this was during solar maximum for uh that solar cycle uh this was solar cycle 22 but uh that was one of the strongest DST index drops that we’ve ever measured we also have 2003 right here and we see two really big storms here here we have the Halloween storms double drop in the DST index very long duration and then we also had a storm on the 20th and the 21st of November this green line here that was also quite significant the DST index dropped even more than it did for the Halloween storms but it was a a shorter time duration event and now we have 2024 and we have our DST indices January February March April May we do see some other storms here like this one but then we have this G5 storm there and we’re still in this recovery period we see that we’re actually kind of quite elevated showing an enhancement of that ring current still and that’s probably going to last for a few more days until finally returns to its normal value of about zero for reference this was a G1 storm right here that was that May 2nd KP index bump that we saw we see the DST index going to 00 uh this is a 00 time scale SC here so we can see right there 100 nanotesla it goes negative if we just look to the right we’ll see some of the factors that contributed to these geomagnetic storms just keep in mind that there are many factors which together influence the severity of a geomagnetic storm and this would be solar wind density and velocity the total field strength of the interplanetary magnetic field the quality of the Southward Z component whether it is uh really sharply negative the degree of concurrent ionization for example you can have a storm uh that impacts right as you have a x flare go off on the sun and that light will take 8.3 minutes to reach the Earth and causing ionization you also have solar proton radiation storms affecting the ionization of the ionosphere and upper atmosphere uh also the the quality of the plasmasphere whether the radiation belts are fully charged what’s the status of the Magneto tail things of that nature influence geomagnetic storms pre-existing geomagnetic conditions did the earth just get out of a geomagnetic storm before another one came in and as we saw with this most recent geomagnetic storm the G5 the number of chronal mass ejections because there were six plus CMEs that impacted Earth in Rapid succession none of them were terribly strong in regards to like some of these other ones here x17.2 for the Halloween storms but there was a whole bunch of them so that is a very important variable so we can look at our 1989 geomagnetic storm March 13th to the 14th this was at the maximum phase of solar cycle 22 Sunspot numbers for that March were 17.4 and on March 10th there was a 4.5 x-class flare on March 12th there was a 7.3 x-class flare the velocities for these CMEs are as shown 760 km/ second 1320 km/ second and the maximum DST drop was 589 nanotesla so we see that they really just dropping almost this Nega 600 nanotesla before returning slowly back to zero we see that it you know during the maximum phase that ring current state enhanc for about like two weeks there so this this type of geomagnetic storming can occur that recovery phase can last a long time after a significant geomagnetic storm now if we look at the Halloween storms October 29th to 31st there was an x17.2 on the 28th of October and X10 on the 29th they were extremely fast solar wind shock from that chronal mass ejection for the 17.2 was 2125 km/ second for the x10 it was 1,948 km per second and so that spiked the solar wind velocity up quite a bit before it kind of resumed below 1,000 km/ second and there was a double DST drop the first one there is – 353 the second one is – 383 so it did not get below -400 nanotesla but stayed uh low for a long time and so that shows that the ring current was enhanced in its strength for a long period of time due to that double impact and if you look at the videos for that x17.2 flare you can see just how crazy it is and also for that X10 flare that cronal mass ejection was really really something special and both triggered solar proton radiation storms which also affected the Dynamics at play now just a month later we had the G magnetic storm of November 20th to 21st and this is not often reported or talked about but it’s important to look at because we see our maximum DST drop was- 472 nanotesla so really significant we see that right here but it was only from a sequence of mclass flares so we had M 4.6 M 5.6 m6.5 but this was a super long duration 11-hour flare so the overall length of that solar explosion was very very long and as a result it was still able to trigger a significant you know very powerful G5 geom magnetic storm dropping the DST all the way to 472 solar wind speed for that storm was about 750 km/s uh and this was in 2003 it was a declining phase of solar cycle 23 sunspots in October were 97.8 for November 82.9 Which is less than what we have right now now we going to look at our gnetic storm for May 10th to the 12th 2024 we just got out of it on May 8th we had a 1.04 xass flare then an 8.6 M Class flare followed by another 1.0x class flare on the 9th we had a 2.22 x-class flare followed by a 1.12 xass flare and then on the 10th there was a 3.98 x-class flare all those released Halo chronal mass ejections that impacted the Earth so the solar wind jumped to 700 km per second uh when with the first impact and by the end we hit a max value of 1,000 km/s the maximum DST drop was- 412 nanotesla and so we see that here we see that there was actually enhancement um in the DST showing a weakening of the Ring current right before that impact came in and then there was a really really precipitous drop all the way to 412 very broad duration it’s still recovering but you can see that it looks quite a bit different than these others it looks the most similar to the November storm of 2003 Halloween storm is quite a bit different and the 1989 storm is just on a whole another level in terms of the DST drop so we have seen geomagnetic storms like this before this is not an unknown phenomenon it’s something that we’ve experienced before and it’s something that we will experience again and if you want to look back in time at prior activity the DST index is great for that because we have these values going all the way back to I believe 1957 so going way back in time so you can look at these different storms and compare them to each other and that’s very very Val so again there’s a lot of different factors that influence the severity of a geomagnetic storm and it’s not just Earth’s magnetic field and it’s Condition it’s also the quality of the CME itself and perhaps concurrent ionization the interplanetary magnetic field strength we had a very strong interplanetary magnetic field with this storm going up to Beyond 50 60 the total field strength went all the way to 70 whereas the Southward component went very sharply NE negative some of these other storms the interplanetary magnetic field was not as strong but let’s say the velocity was higher like the CME shock for the Halloween storms was extremely extremely high so that is a very important thing to keep in mind when looking at these geomagnetic storms and then making any assessment on Earth’s magnetic field for example as a result it’s useful to put Earth’s magnetic field changes from a geomagnetic storm in context of Earth’s larger long longer duration magnetic field changes so we will look at 8,000 years of magnetic field changes based on Pottery sh paleo intensity data and so here on the top left we have Earth magnetic field intensity from 6000 BCE to 2000 CE and we see that Earth magnetic field strength was about 50,000 nanotesla in between 50 to 40,000 nanotesla for quite a long period perod of time all the way from 6,000 BCE to 3,000 BCE before Earth’s magnetic field strengthened quite dramatically with the Balkan region having a magnetic field strength of about 70,000 nanotesla or 70 microtesla or 0.7 gaus before we started to drop again and this was about 1,000 BCE and now Earth’s magnetic field has been dropping back to these valleys that we had during the Neolithic so we’re back to about 45 50,000 nanotesla for the Balkan region and we can zoom in here’s our red section there going from 1,000 BCE to 2,000 CE we can zoom in and look at specifically here here we have our Italian paleointensity data so very close by and we see that the intensity was 60,000 nanotesla there and now it’s about 50,000 nanotesla so it looks like it’s starting to level off but that is up to be seen of course no one knows what the future holds but we do see that there are normal decreases and increases and periods of stability in Earth’s magnetic field so these field values where we are now are not uncommon we’ve seen this before we had a very long period of magnetic field strength just like this today during the Neolithic where humans prospered and it was the you know the birth of civilization whereas during this period here actually the the Greek Dark Ages as they call them the magnetic field was the strongest out of about 70,000 nanotesla also we have these magnetic field maps here we have the magnetic field map for 2014 the the main thing I want to show you here are the two Northern polar cusp so in the northern hemisphere there are two regions of Maximum field strength one over Siberia one over Canada you have that just a single region like that in the southern hemisphere around the South Pole the South magnetic pole and then you also have the South Atlantic anomaly so this is a big magnetic low in Earth’s magnetic field you see these equatorial regions here typically have strengths around you know 40,000 35 40,000 nanotesla but here at the South Atlantic anomaly it goes all the way down to 22,000 nanotesla 25,000 depends on where you are but the very peak of it there is right in Brazil and it’s about 22,000 nanotesla there and so we can look at how Earth’s magnetic field has been changing across space and time we see that from January to June of 2014 it was this western side of the planet here you know North and South America which had magnetic field reductions of about 50 nanotesla some places a little bit more and then other parts of the world the Eastern Parts had increases and this is because uh the north magnetic pole is moving towards Siberia at this moment away from Canada and so we’re getting this reduction in strength in the flux lobe over Canada and this increase in strength over Siberia contributing to the larger changes of Earth’s magnetic field and so to wrap up now let’s look at some specific magnetic field observatories from around the world and the total magnetic field strength values that they reported during this time frame we’ll look at Fresno and Boulder for the United States oopsa and Warsaw for Europe tasat for Algeria and for Africa as a whole Guam for this southeast Asia region and then vurus Brazil for South America and this is also right in the South Atlantic anomaly which is very very interesting and then we’ll look at Scott base Antarctica cuz that’s right next to the South magnetic pole so again we have our map here on the right so you can see see these locations on the left we have different magnetic field traces for the total field strength for these locations from May 9th all the way to the 13th so Fresno Boulder vurus oopsa BK Poland which is near Warsaw right next to Warsaw tet for Algeria Guam and then Scott base and so you can see the size of these magnetic field fluctuations right off the bat 500 nanotesla pulse for Fresno because it went down and up 1,000 nanotesla pulls for Boulder again a swing but you see in Boulder it actually went up before it then went down the they you see the changes across earth they’re not homogeneous uh every place responds differently based on its location in Earth’s magnetic field vurus Brazil had a 350 nesla drop there was really no increase except a little bump at the beginning and then a precipitous drop down oopsa Sweden had a 12 1,200 nanotesla pulse Bells had a 1,000 nanotesla pulse down and up we had T set going mostly down 400 nanotesla drop down Guam similar 500 nanotesla drop down and then Scott base at the South magnetic pole having a 1,250 nanotesla Spike there was a slight drop there but in general it spiked up so you’ll notice one Trend right away with visur tamet and Guam they are all in this kind of like more Southern section here in the equatorial regions so that really shows the effect of that enhanced ring current and that’s why the DST index is important to measure and then up in the northern like the mid latitudes higher latitudes that ring current isn’t as important and you get more of these these pulses rather than just drops in Earth’s magnetic field strength you will notice too on the right side here that the magnetic field is recovered for all these locations so they’re all back to normal values and so this was a temporary decrease or a temporary pulse in Earth’s magnetic field strength these are about 1 to 3% variations in Earth’s normal total magnetic field strength whereas the dial variations are about one tenth of a percent so it is quite significance for example in the northern hemisphere Earth’s magnetic field has dial variations of decreasing strength by approximately 5050 nanotesla so here we have Boulder Colorado for April 10th to the 14th of 2024 we see these normal drops there in the field strength that’s because uh that’s when that part of the Earth is rotating into view of the Sun and so you get this decrease based on interactions with the plasmasphere these are just the normal dial variations and then in the southern hemisphere you’ll see that we have increases in the magnetic field strength for the dial variations and these are also about 50 nanotesla so that is typical what’s interesting is that this NE this 350 nesla drop at vurus Brazil which is located in the South Atlantic anomaly that was a 1.5% reduction in total field strength from its normal 23,200 nanotesla value and that from the G5 storm so the reason I’m highlighting that is because in this South Atlantic anomaly we really have a an area of extreme magnetic field uh low it’s very very weak there you know this whole contour line is 25,000 nanotesla or less vurus there is 23,200 nanotesla and so for there to be a 350 nanotesla drop a 1.5% reduction in the total field strength even transiently is quite significant and the the question I’ve been pondering is will this magnetic anomaly ever drop below 20,000 nanotesla uh that would be really quite significant if we were to start entering into the teenss there especially in context of the other planets like Mercury and Uranus Neptune all the planets that have magnetic fields um Earth is actually quite strong but once you start to get into that that lower range then it becomes more questionable how well the Earth can hold up to space weather um so swings in Earth’s total magnetic field strength will be greatest at the North and South magnetic poles because charg particles from space will follow the vertical magnetic field lines down towards Earth’s surface and the movement of these charged particles like electrons and protons create magnetic fields which add or subtract from Earth’s magnetic field so if we look back here we see that oopsa was a 12,000 nanotesla pulse oopsa is near the north magnetic pole it’s a fairly High latitude Observatory location Scott base is right next to the South magnetic pole it has a 1,250 nanotesla Spike so the the swings were greatest in those locations and the others were all less Warsaw which is fairly close to oopsa had a 1,000 nanotesla pulse surprisingly Boulder had a 1,000 nanotesla pulse I was quite surprised to see that uh but all the rest you see are 500 or so 350 400 500 um and so those are all about 1.5 to 2% in their differences the the the biggest swing in terms of the total field strength was Scott base 1,250 nanotesla represents a 2.8% swing in Earth’s magnetic field strength which is really quite significant especially compared to dial variations which are typically a tenth of a percent so you can look at this data yourself if you really want a better understanding of what happened to Earth’s magnetic field because this data is publicly available through intermagnet I will link that in the video description and you can just pull up the different observatories you can type in the date you can look at the different component directions to X Y and Z we didn’t talk about that in this video but you see how there are variations that are different across time what was so significant about this storm was the length of the storm right the the extreme drops and also how the the ring current is still enhanced to this moment as to when I’m recording this video so it it really was a very powerful storm and you don’t necessarily need a x50 flare or something to trigger a very powerful storm you can have conditions that are different from that you can have six or seven chal mass ejections in a row impact the Earth like which is what happened causing these very significant geomagnetic field changes but you will see that everything is back to normal in the field strength and you can look at the field strength yourself so if you do hear anyone saying crazy reductions in Earth magnetic field strength you can look at the values using inter magnet and you can look at the historic values and calculate those percentages for yourself very very easily it’s not difficult to do do your own research I hope I helped you with this video in that if You’ like to do more research into Earth’s magnetic field then I recommend my Earth magnetic field Master guide I’ll put the information for that in the video description and also you can click this box here on the screen to be taken directly to that page so wishing you all well I hope you found that valuable please leave your thoughts in the comments below and I’ll see you all in the next video