GPS & Solar Flares, a real problem?
Last week we saw how a GPS misused could cause a fiery frig up, but can giant fiery explosions on the Sun frig up the whole GPS system? I first heard about this thanks to a small article in the February issue of Soundings. It’s not online, but the research and incidents it discusses are. The phenomenon of flare-induced radio wave bursts interfering with relatively weak GPS signals was perhaps first observed in Sept. 2005, as reported by two Cornell U. researchers a year later. Shortly thereafter—on Dec. 5, 2006–the huge flare seen above caused a burst powerful enough to “swamp GPS receivers over the entire sunlit side of Earth” the next day, according to a scientist quoted by NOAA magazine. Now, it’s not clear to me how many civilians suffered noticeable GPS glitches on that day, or for how long, but I can tell that I first had my ear bent about the need for a secondary electronic positioning system back 2001, which led to this PMY column. The obvious choice seems to be Loran, but apparently our government is still thinking about it. (Let’s hope Class B AIS approval doesn’t take so long!) At any rate, when headed out to sea you might want to check space weather as well as the ocean variety, and of course don’t rely on any one stream of nav data.
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Working with a Dynamic Positioning system aboard my ship makes GPS critically inmportant. While we have advance (expensive!) differential systems we still suffer signal loss due to this problem about once every few months. To help pro-mariners gCaptain put together some tools for monitoring GPS systems. They are actually just links to the resources on the web (including space weather) that we use on a daily basis. They can be found under the "electronic navigation" and weather links here: Marine Tools & Links
The space weather stuff is on the Marine Weather page and the advanced GPS tools is on the Electronic Navigation page.
-John