Jeff Kenyon writes:
> Hi, right now there is little activity on the sun and one would have
> expected it to gradually start to pickup around this time.  How does the
> peek of 2001 compare to other cycles?  Some people have said that that 
> cycle
> wasn't real active compared to other ones.

	There was actually a double peak. One was in 2001 and
the second in 2002 and they are thought to have been not as
great as previous cycles.

	The best one of all in modern history is thought to be
Cycle 19 which peaked in March of 1958. Cycle 21 around 1980 was
pretty good and so was the peak of Cycle 22 which was at least
average around 1991 or 1992.

	We need to read articles like this one with a measure of
reserve. There is always somebody screaming that the sky is
falling or will do so shortly. In past Solar peaks, we have
definitely had oddities such as equipment malfunctions on some
power grids or noise on long telephone cables due to
magnetically-induced electric currents, but these things tended
to break isolated systems. There is a report of some sort of
magnetic storm effecting Montrialle's power system several years
ago.

	What can happen is that changes in the magnetic fields
around very long wires can have the effect of creating an
accidental generator or magneto. After all, we get electricity
by deliberately moving coils of wire past huge magmets at power
stations. If you have miles of wire stretched out in a power
line or berried under water, a change in the magnetic field
around it will cause the same effect. When the Sun has a
magnetic storm, it's magnetic field interacts with the Earth's
magnetic field to cause momentary changes in intensity.

	There have been instances of circuit breakers being
tripped and strong but low-voltage currents ebbing and flowing
along long wires and pipelines during Solar storms.

	I think the upshot of all this is that we might have
glitches and localized service disruptions but a whole-scale
melt-down of all things electronic is not likely.

	We had a wapper of a Solar storm in March of 1989, I
think, which was one of the biggest ever recorded. It caused
compasses in the North Sea to be off by as much as 5 degrees so
temporarily shut down drilling and other petroleum activities in
that region due to the danger of boats simply running in to
things due to being off-course, but even that didn't shut down
the whole world.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group