[TVARC] The New York Railroad Superstorm

[Tom G]

Interesting Info from my DMR Group in NE...

Begin forwarded message:

From: Bill Barber <ne1b.c6awb at gmail.com>
Date: May 16, 2020 at 12:37:30 PM EDT
To: "NEDECN - New England Dig." <nedecn at googlegroups.com>
Subject: [NEDECN] Fwd: The New York Railroad Superstorm



Did you know solar storms could cause a fire on earth?

The 100-year geomagnetic storm 99 years ago today
   From: Chuck W1HIS <ccc at mit.edu>
   Date: Fri, 15 May 2020 20:42:03 PDT

I’ve copied the following from the Army-Radios.groups.io<http://Army-Radios.groups.io> reflector.  -Chuck W1HIS


Newspaper headlines 99 years ago today:

“Telegraph Service Prostrated” — The Los Angeles Times

“Electrical Disturbance is ‘Worst Ever Known'” — The Chicago Daily Tribune

“Sunspot credited with Rail Tie-up” — The New York Times.

These newspapers were reporting the biggest geomagnetic storm of the 20th Century.  Nothing quite like it has happened since.

It began on May 12, 1921 when giant sunspot AR1842, crossing the sun during the declining phase of Solar Cycle 15, began to flare.  One explosion after another hurled coronal mass ejections (CMEs) toward Earth.  For the next 3 days, CMEs rocked the geomagnetic field.  Magnetometers went offscale; pens in strip chart recorders pegged.

Then the fires began.  Around 02:00 GMT on May 15th, a telegraph exchange in Sweden burst into flames.  About an hour later, the same thing happened in Brewster, New York.  Flames engulfed the switchboard at the Brewster station of the Central New England Railroad and quickly spread to destroy the whole building.  Due to that fire and another one at about the same time in a railroad control tower near New York City’s Grand Central Station, the event became known as the “New York Railroad Superstorm.”

The fires were caused by electrical currents, induced by geomagnetic activity, heating telephone and telegraph lines to the point of combustion, and by induced e.m.f’s breaking down insulation and striking arcs.  Such currents and voltages disrupted telegraph systems in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the UK and USA.  The Ottawa Journal reported that many long-distance telephone lines in New Brunswick were burned out by the storm.  On some telegraph lines in the USA, voltages spiked as high as 1000 V.

During the storm’s peak on May 15th, southern cities like Los Angeles and Atlanta looked like Fairbanks, with Northern Lights dancing overhead.  Auroras were seen in the USA as far south as Texas.  In the Pacific, red auroras were sighted from Samoa and Tonga and from ships at sea crossing the equator.

What would happen if such a storm occurred today?

Researchers have long grappled with this question –- most recently in a pair of in-depth papers published in the journal Space Weather: “The Great Storm of May 1921: An Exemplar of a Dangerous Space Weather Event” by Mike Hapgood (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK) and “Intensity and Impact of the New York Railroad Superstorm of May 1921” by Jeffrey Love (US Geological Survey) and colleagues.

The preceding summary is drawn from Hapgood’s work.  He painstakingly searched historical records including scientific journals, newspaper clippings, and other reports to create a moment-by-moment timeline of the storm.

Jeffrey Love and colleagues found some old magnetic chart recordings that had not gone offscale when the May 1921 CMEs hit; and, using these data, they calculated the “DST” (disturbance storm time) index, a measure of geomagnetic activity favored by modern space weather researchers.

“The storm attained an estimated maximum DST on 15 May of 907 ± 132 nT, an intensity comparable to that of the Carrington Event of 1859,” they wrote in their paper.

This result upends conventional wisdom.  Most of us have heard that the Carrington Event was the strongest solar storm in recorded history.   The estimated DST of the Carrington Event was 900 nT.  Now we know that the May 1921 storm was equally strong.

If the May 1921 storm hit today, “I’d expect it to lead to most, if not all, of the impacts outlined in the 2013 Royal Academy of Engineering report led by Paul Cannon,” says Hapgood.  “This could include regional power outages, profound changes to satellite orbits, and loss of radio-based technologies such as GPS.  The disruption of GPS could significantly impact logistics and emergency services.”

Food for thought on the 99th anniversary of a 100-year storm….  
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