Solar Flares and you

By Reviewer Rob

There was a solar flare episode around Halloween in October of 2003 and it coincided with a major brushfire that burned hundreds of homes in San Diego. For days the cloudless skies were filled with brown-orange smoke which acted like a filter against the sun and you could see clearly the two large sunspots in the lower-right of the disc. At the time I figured, “Oh, well that must be the way the sun normally looks.” But then weeks later the news was reporting that one of the reasons why the brushfire got so out of control was because one of the effects of the solar flares is that they interfere with radio communication, making it difficult the night of the fire’s startup and thereafter to coordinate air-drops of retardant.

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