Are we in a solar grand minimum? We’ve seen this before, but now predictions are for an extremely weak solar cycle ahead.
Today is the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. The sun has been without a single observable sunspot now for over a month – 33 days according to NOAA and SIDC data. Spaceweather.com says:
“This is a sign of Solar Minimum, a phase of the solar cycle that brings extra cosmic rays, long-lasting holes in the sun’s atmosphere, and a possible surplus of noctilucent clouds. “
There’s been sightings of the electric blue noctilucent clouds as far south as Joshua Tree, near Los Angeles, and many many other locations. But one of the most interesting things is due to the fact that the Sun’s magnetic field has weakened, more cosmic rays are now bombarding Earth and some airline flights are seeing doses of radiation up to 73 times that which we’d see at ground level.
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For example, a flight from Chicago, IL to Teterboro, NJ which flies at 45,000 feet gets 73.3 times the radiation dosage than a traveler would experience at ground level. A typical commercial flight across the United States gives you about 40x exposure – about the same amount of radiation as a typical dental x-ray. The Chicago-Teterboro flight is almost double that. Frequent air travelers during the solar minimum like we have now would get an even more elevated dose of cosmic rays.
Spaceweather.com is monitoring passenger flights:
We are constantly flying radiation sensors onboard airplanes over the US and and around the world, so far collecting more than 22,000 gps-tagged radiation measurements. Using this unique dataset, we can predict the dosage on any flight over the USA with an error no worse than 15%.
E-RAD lets us do something new: Every day we monitor approximately 1400 flights criss-crossing the 10 busiest routes in the continental USA. Typically, this includes more than 80,000 passengers per day. E-RAD calculates the radiation exposure for every single flight.
The Hot Flights Table is a daily summary of these calculations. It shows the 5 charter flights with the highest dose rates; the 5 commercial flights with the highest dose rates; 5 commercial flights with near-average dose rates; and the 5 commercial flights with the lowest dose rates. Passengers typically experience dose rates that are 20 to 70 times higher than natural radiation at sea level.
