Solar storm not as strong as feared - USA TODAY

A solar storm struck Earth's magnetic field early Thursday morning, delivering "a pretty good shock" but not causing any of the geomagnetic disruptions that scientists feared.

NASA, Getty Images

A solar flare, the largest in five years, erupts from the sun's surface.

NASA, Getty Images

A solar flare, the largest in five years, erupts from the sun's surface.

"All told, it's not a terribly strong event," said physicist Joe Kunches of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at a news conference Thursday.

The solar outburst struck Earth's magnetic field around 6:05 a.m ET, Kunches said, cutting some radio communications at the poles, but it didn't upset electronics and communications elsewhere.

NOAA rated the resultant solar storm at a G1 level, a minor storm, largely because the outburst's magnetic field aligned with Earth's in a way that minimized damage. On the G1 to G5 scale of geomagnetic storm intensity, with G5 being the worst, Kunches had predicted earlier the storm would be a G3, considered to be a "strong" one.

"We're like a baseball hitter trying to see a curveball coming," Kunches said.

Astronomers could tell the solar eruption Tuesday was coming in fast and pointed at Earth but they couldn't predict the magnetic impact — crucial information that could reveal whether the storm's effects would be more severe.

As it was, the storm only diverted airplane flights over the North and South poles, typically 15-minute delays to long trips, and disrupted radio communications at both poles.

No Global Positioning Satellite information outages resulted, Kunches said. He warned the storm was continuing until Friday as the tail of the solar outburst passes Earth by.

"It could get worse," he said, if the storm's magnetic field shifts in a way that delivers a stronger pop to Earth's protective magnetic field. But the hotspot on the sun that delivered the solar storm looks quiet for now, he said.

Skywatchers in the North will get a treat from the aurora borealis, or northern lights, which are caused by the solar storm and should be near their peak Thursday night.

The lights will occur across much of the northern tier of the USA, as far south as Oregon in the West, Illinois in the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic states in the East, Kunches said.

The storm took about 36 hours to travel 93 million miles from the sun. A very strong storm in 2003 took only about 19 hours.

"This is the season now where we can expect more of these storms," Kunches said.

The sun operates on an 11-year cycle of waxing and waning solar outbursts, expected to increase over the next 12 to 19 months.

Contributing: Carolyn Pesce in McLean, Va.

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