Talking to an LLM is not a substitute for reading the relevant literature or talking to an expert in the field.
I sent this to my friend Jason Derr, who is an actual expert. I did fusion plasma physics—he does space plasma physics focusing on aurora. I can call out egregious errors, but if I start diving into the details, I’m likely to make mistakes.[1] He has been working with these details for years.
The plasma physics in this post is mostly wrong. The figure I criticized earlier has the highest density of errors, but the text is also riddled with them. Other parts of the posts also look suspicious, but we’re not relevant experts for them. A few of the major errors:
Solar storms ≠ geomagnetic storms ≠ substorms ≠ auroras ≠ electrojet intensifications ≠ coronal mass ejections. If you want to be vague, say “space weather”. This post is mostly about geomagnetic storms (in the Earth’s magnetic field), not solar storms (in the sun’s atmosphere).
There are multiple relevant satellites at L1. You can see a list here.
The direction of the magnetic field of the solar wind is not a coin flip. It’s mostly determined by which side of the heliospheric current sheet the Earth is currently on, and there’s finer structure both around the current sheet and coming from the CME. We keep track of the local structure, and can figure out the structure of the CME by looking at it when it leaves the surface of the sun.
If the main point of the article is that solar activity can have major impacts on the grid, that is true—and also on GPS satellites and HF radio communication. Geomagnetic activity’s effects on the economy and infrastructure are relatively unknown by the public. But it is a topic which has substantial research. One neglected area that Jason mentioned is getting better magnetotelluric data.
Jason gave me a “sparse” list of recommendations of the literature if you want to learn about this topic, and is happy to chat with people who are interested:
On the uncertain intensity estimate of the 1859 Carrington storm
Major Space Weather Risks Identified via Coupled Physics-Engineering-Economic Modeling
Global landscape of space weather observations, research and operations
The impact of space weather on the national-scale power grid and the associated economic losses
I like posts like this that dive into something that most people are not an expert in, and have written some similar ones myself. But they need to be researched by reading the actual literature, not by asking an LLM.
- ^
For example, in my comment on electrojets, I described the figure as “normal conditions”, when those currents only rarely look like that. The figure is meant to illustrate the dawn-to-dusk or dusk-to-dawn directions, which is how those current systems are defined.
He does prefer email, at: jason.r.derr@protonmail.com