Solar energy eruptions can cause warm air to surge up from the Earth. That can drag some satellites to lower orbits, forcing satellite operators to use rocket fuel to reposition the spacecraft. The Global Positioning Satellite System is the most worrisome because we are starting to land airplanes with that system. Electromagnetic energy from the sun can send huge waves of electrical energy surging along power lines, shorting circuits and burning out equipment. A 1989 solar storm caused a province-wide blackout in Quebec, and coils in a transformer station in Salem, New Jersey, melted and caught fire, causing a regional outage.
Disruptions are rare, but they do occur about once or twice every decade.
The new early warning could be particularly useful in the next year or so, as the sun reaches the peak of its 11-year cycle. During the peak, eruptions increase in intensity, threatening havoc to Earth's electrical and magnetic fields. During the last solar peak, in March 1989, a solar eruption knocked out electrical power for between nine hours to one week for millions of Canadians. The areas on the Sun where the magnetic fields are bent into S-shapes seem to form mostly in the sun's southern atmosphere and within cool, dark patches of the surface known as sunspots.