We’ve had a few questions about NOAA scales for various solar burps. Particularly- “What is an M Class Flare?” What does this mean?
There is a jazz tune called “Solar Flare,” and for the life of me, I can’t remember who wrote it, but I used to go along to Monday night jazz in my beret at the age of 17 and tootle along at that. There isn’t a tune called “Solar CME.” Maybe it just doesn’t sound as good. And as the Duke said- well, you know what the Duke said.
What NOAA says is that there are three varieties of things that can emit from the sun. I’m not convinced there aren’t more, but, we humans like to categorize things.
According to NOAA, and also the rest of the space weather science universe, there are geomagnetic storms, solar radiation storms, and radio blackouts. There are scales of intensity that go along with those three things, kind of like how the Richter scale goes along with earthquakes.
We’re mainly concerned with Geomagnetic storms, which you know as G1 Minor (yellow,) G2 Moderate (dark yellow,) G3 Strong (orange,) G4 Severe (red,) and G5 Extreme (dark red or purple over on Glendale. I think.) We can sometimes see aurora at the G1 level around here, but it helps a lot when we get to an orange level alert.
You don’t hear me talking about solar radiation storms or radio blackouts all that often, but, I do monitor them, because while not all “flares” become or are a CME, essentially, things that are flaring out of the sun are of interest to someone like me. It means that there is activity. Something is happening. It may not be a geomagnetic storm, but, activity is occurring. Things are rumbling, so, I monitor them, and I have an alert system on my phone for radio blackouts, mainly because it’s fun to be somewhere when something stops working and if I look at my alerts, I can wonder if maybe that is why. Or, I can go ask the squirrels outside if they did something.
I’m not talking about solar radiation storms here, because I’m trying to just separate out this Flares vs CME stuff for now. Which, if you spent a portion of your life teaching particles to high school students as these things that orbited around other things in a nice tidy way, and then suddenly your life was blown out of the water by emerging science that threw all that out the window, you might be feeling like you were devolving into chaos. I often remind myself that the way we describe the universe is dependent on our human ability to understand it. Which is how I suspect we arrived at all these scales. (Just breathe. Moving on…)
Radio Blackouts are our “Official Flares of NOAA/SWPC,” and they are measured using the letter R, with numbers 1-5. Instead of the letter G. The FLARE component of the Radio blackout is classified as either an M Class Flare or an X Class flare, and the M and X also have numerical intensity scales associated with them. For our member who asked about M Class Flares, this is what NOAA/SWPC is talking about.
For our purposes, we can keep things separated out into Geomagnetic Storms which involve CMEs, and Radio Blackouts which involve Flares. It is, in my humble opinion, somewhat of a simplified way of looking at it, but, we need a way to look at something as massive as billions of tons of plasma in the insanely vast expanse that is space.
I do watch them and observe them both, maybe just to absorb what’s happening and sort of let that be a part of the mix of what I do.
Here is the link to the NOAA/SWPC scales. This is super helpful, it’s a good one to save somewhere.