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Zeichick's Take: A Solar Flare Ate My Data


By Alan Zeichick
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April 12, 2007 —  (Page 1 of 2)
One class that you won't see at the upcoming Software Test & Performance Conference (next week in Silicon Valley) is one on dealing with software failures caused by streams of high-energy electrons blasting Earth's atmosphere.

Yet, if your application relies on a continuous stream of data from the Global Positioning System, that would have been the cause of some intermittent data problems on Dec. 6, 2006, when our Sun gave off a huge burst of solar flares. Those flares were strong enough to disrupt a lot of radio communications, including the relatively weak signals broadcast by the GPS satellite constellation. (If you own a GPS receiver, you've probably noticed that reception can be blocked by dense vegetation—or even just a few soggy leaves after a rainstorm. It really is a weak signal.)

Ham radio operators (of which I'm one) have long known about the disruptive influence of solar flares. There's a solar cycle of about 11 years, during which the Sun's output of electrons can change dramatically. At various times during that cycle, there can be huge flares; when those electron streams hit the Earth's ionosphere, all radio reception can be affected. But some signals, like those used by the GPS system, can be affected more than others, in part because the GPS signals are quite weak, and also because some of the bursts are on the same frequency band as the GPS transmissions, around 1575 MHz.

Because the solar flares are cyclical, they can be predicted to some extent. Based on research after some flares disrupted GPS communications on Sept. 7, 2005, researchers at Cornell University calculate that there will be an even bigger disruption of the GPS system during the next big solar-flare maximum, in 2011–2012. But then, there was the disruption last December—which wasn't predicted, and which according to some reports I've read, knocked GPS signal strength down by about 50 percent for about 15 minutes. And that was a small flare.



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