The 1859 space weather event revisited: limits of extreme activity

By E. Cliver, W. Dietrich. 2013

266 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The solar flare on 1 September 1859 and its associated geomagnetic storm remain the standard for an extreme solar-terrestrial event. The most recent estimates of the flare soft X-ray (SXR) peak intensity and D st magnetic storm index for this event are: SXR class = X45 (±5) (vs. X35 (±5) for the 4 November 2003 flare) and minimum D st = −900 (+50, −150) nT (vs. −825 to −900 nT for the great storm of May 1921). We have no direct evidence of an associated solar energetic proton (SEP) event but a correlation between >30 MeV SEP fluence (F30 ) and flare size based on modern data yields a best guess F30 value of ~1.1 × 1010 pr cm−2 (with the ±1σ uncertainty spanning a range from ~109 –1011  pr cm−2 ) for a composite (multi-flare plus shock) 1859 event. This value is approximately twice that of estimates/measurements – ranging from ~5–7 × 109  pr cm−2 – for the largest SEP episodes (July 1959, November 1960, August 1972) in the modern era.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e2a9c74ab5876091e86903390b9115271e7dd393

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

  1. G. Lakhina
  2. B. Tsurutani
  3. Astrid Maute
  4. Y. Yamazaki
  5. E. Cliver

In Molecular Biology

  1. G. Lakhina
  2. Astrid Maute
  3. Y. Yamazaki
  4. B. Tsurutani
  5. E. Cliver

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