20241776 Club
Solar storm slams Earth; auroras blaze over Florida, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico
AR3664's X-class flares trigger the worst geomagnetic storm in 21 years, knocking a weather satellite offline and forcing hundreds of low-orbit satellites to maneuver at once.
Starting May 10, 2024, a solar active region designated AR3664 unleashed a cascade of X-class flares and coronal mass ejections that drove a G5-class geomagnetic storm — the most intense since the 2003 Halloween storms and the most powerful to affect Earth since March 1989. The storm, named after space physicist Jennifer Gannon, pushed auroras to the Florida Keys, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and as far south as Algeria and northern India. It also knocked out a major American weather satellite for nearly two hours and forced roughly half of all low-Earth-orbit satellites to execute the largest coordinated orbital maneuver ever recorded…
