Space News & Blog Articles

Planet Earth is currently experiencing an unprecedented warming trend. Average global temperatures are rising at an accelerated rate in response to greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activity. These rising temperatures, in turn, result in the release of additional greenhouse gases (like methane), leading to positive feedback loops that threaten to compound the problem further.

This scientific consensus is based on multiple lines of evidence, all of which indicate the need for swift action. According to new research led by members of the NASA Sea Level Change Science Team (N-SLCT) at the University of Hawaii at Manao (UHM), a new Lunar cycle that will begin by the mid-2030s will amplify sea levels already rising due to climate change. This will mean even more coastal flooding during high tides and coastal storms in the near future.

The study that describes their findings, titled “Rapid increases and extreme months in projections of United States high-tide flooding,” was published last month in Nature Climate Change. The research was led by Phil Thompson, an assistant professor at UHM’s Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, and included members from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of South Florida, NASA JPL, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

NOAA projections on coastal floods in 2021. Credit: NOAA

Also known as “nuisance floods” (or sunny day floods), high tide floods (HTFs) are already a problem in many coastal cities around the world. These occur when tides reach anywhere from 0.5 to 0.6 m (1.75 to 2 ft) above the daily average for high tides, leading to flooded shorelines, streets, storm drains, and basements in coastal communities. According to reports by the NOAA, more than 600 of these floods occurred in 2019 alone.

Similar reports indicated that between May 2020 and April 2021, coastal communities in the US saw twice as many HTFs as they did in 2000. In addition, 14 locations along the Southeast Atlantic and Gulf coastlines tied or broke their records for the number of HTF days by a factor of 4 to 11 over what they experienced in 2000, and the number of HTF events is now accelerating at 80% of NOAA water level stations along the East and Gulf Coasts.

Space is full of hazards.  The Earth, and it’s atmosphere, does a great job of shielding us from most of them.  But sometimes those hazards are more powerful than even those protections can withstand, and potentially catastrophic events can result.  Some of the most commonly known potential catastrophic events are solar flares.  While normal solar activity can be deflected by the planet’s magnetic field, resulting in sometimes spectacular auroras, larger solar flares are a danger to look out for.  So it’s worth celebrating a team of researchers from the International Space Science Institute which found a way to better track these potentially dangerous natural events.

Extremely large coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are relatively rare, and when they do happen they normally aren’t pointed at Earth.  This was the case in 2012, when a massive solar flare missed Earth, but could have knocked out power grids and destroyed satellites on an entire hemisphere of the planet.

UT Video discussing the severity of solar storms.

Flares as large as the one in 2012 are relatively easy to detect using conventional sensing methods, because of their size but also their positioning.    These sensors can watch for signs of brightening on the Sun’s surface that are indicative of a solar flare, or watch the flare itself as it passes out of the sun into the blackness of space.    Unfortunately the same sensing techniques are not able to detect the most important kind of CMEs – those that are aimed right for us but don’t cause any brightening.  

These CMEs, which don’t produce any telltale signs on the Sun’s surface, are known as “stealth” CMEs.  Usually we only notice these when they actually hit the Earth, and don’t have a good indication of where they formed on the Sun.  However, the researchers used data collected on four stealth CMEs by NASA’s STEREO spacecraft that did in fact track them back to their origins on the Sun.  

Anton Petrov’s video discussing the 2012 solar flare.
Credit – Anton Petrov YouTube Channel

When they subsequently analyzed those origin points with other data collected simultaneously, they noticed a changing brightening pattern that appeared for all four stealth CMEs.  They believe these changes are indicative of the stealth CME’s formation, allowing scientists precious time to detect and prepare for a potential massive CME hit once similar patterns are detected.