Matt Yanick, owner of My Precision Ag Ltd., says the flare that various space weather monitoring stations detected Oct. 3 doesn’t seem to have too caused many issues at all.

“I think it’s just kind of grazing us,” said Yanick.

“We’re not going to get really hammered by it like the one last spring.”

The springtime solar flare Yanick is referring to was an X8.79 flare that occurred May 14.

According to the spaceweatherlive.com website, the flare generated Oct. 3 was the 15th most-powerful of all time, rated as an X9. An X7.1 flare, ranking 26 of all time, was recorded Oct. 1.

X-class solar flares are the largest, according to NASA. The classification system NASA uses ranges from A-class flares to B, C, M and then X.

“Similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes, each letter represents a 10-fold increase in energy output,” says a NASA backgrounder on solar flares.

Spaceweatherlive.com lists the top 50 solar flares of all time, and the largest was an X40+ that occurred Nov. 4, 2003.

“Associated with (that) flare was an ejection of a billion tons or more of gas from the sun’s tenuous outer atmosphere, or corona,” NASA said at the time.

“But because the flare occurred on the limb of the sun, pointing away from the Earth, the charged particles it emits will probably only glance off the Earth.”

A solar flare is a tremendous explosion on the Sun that happens when energy stored in “twisted” magnetic fields, usually above sunspots, is suddenly released, according to the European Space Agency (ESA) website.

“In a matter of just a few minutes, they heat material to many millions of degrees and produce a burst of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to X-rays and gamma rays,” the ESA says.

It’s a bit of a mystery why this flare hasn’t caused a greater disruption.

Yanick says his reading indicates scientists still have difficulty tracking these flares as they move toward Earth.

It helps that lots of farmers are done harvest by now and those doing fieldwork, like harrowing, don’t require GPS.

“It wasn’t horrendous, nothing really hit until (Sunday) night,” said Yanick.

“The northern lights kind of showcased that.”

Yanick says there’s not a lot producers can do to guard against interference from solar flares.

Running a higher-accuracy system can help, he said. Farmers running those typically fare a lot better. However, had this flare hit us head on, Yanick says it likely would have knocked out everything anyway.

“With the flare that occurred last spring, even the best systems were having issues,” said Yanick.

“There was no way around it.”

Despite the magnitude of this most recent flare, Yanick says he figures we may get lucky this time round.

“There’s going to be some minor interference that started (Sunday) night,” said Yanick.

“There will likely be more, but nothing major — minor to moderate at best.

“For me, that’s a really good thing.”

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Last year tied with 2015 as the fifth-warmest year since record-keeping began in 1880, NASA said. That was despite the presence of the La Nina weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean, which generally lowers global temperatures slightly.

The world’s average global temperature is now 1.1 C to 1.2 C higher than in pre-industrial times.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Thursday it had ranked 2022 as the sixth warmest since 1880. European Union scientists this week said 2022 was the fifth warmest year in their records.

Climate assessments produce slightly different rankings depending on the data sources used and the way records account for minor data alterations over time, for example, a weather station being moved to a new location.

NASA said temperatures were increasing by more than 0.2 C per decade, putting the world on track to blow past the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global warming to 1.5 C to avoid its most devastating consequences.

“At the rate that we’re going, it’s not going to take more than two decades to get us to that. And the only way that we’re not going to do that is if we stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Schmidt said he expected 2023 to be slightly warmer than 2022, due to a weaker La Nina cooling phenomenon.

“The global mean temperature will be even higher in 10 years from now,” said ETH Zurich climate scientist Sonia Seneviratne, adding that unless countries stopped burning CO2-emitting fossil fuels temperatures would continue to climb.

Weather extremes

The changing climate fuelled weather extremes across the planet in 2022. Europe suffered its hottest summer on record, while in Pakistan floods killed 1,700 people and wrecked infrastructure, drought ravaged crops in Uganda and wildfires ripped through Mediterranean countries.

Despite most of the world’s major emitters pledging to eventually slash their net emissions to zero, global CO2 emissions continue to rise.

Concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere last year reached levels not experienced on earth for three million years, Schmidt said.

At this year’s COP28 climate conference, countries will formally assess their progress towards the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 C goal — and the far faster emissions cuts needed to meet it.

COP28 host the United Arab Emirates on Thursday appointed the head of its state-owned oil company as president of the conference, sparking concerns among campaigners and scientists about the fossil fuel industry’s influence in the talks.

— Kate Abnett is Reuters’ European climate and energy correspondent in Brussels.

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Dubbed SWOT, short for Surface Water and Ocean Topography, the advanced radar satellite is designed to give scientists an unprecedented view of the life-giving fluid covering 70 per cent of the planet, shedding new light on the mechanics and consequences of climate change.

A Falcon 9 rocket, owned and operated by billionaire Elon Musk’s commercial launch company SpaceX, was set to liftoff before dawn on Thursday from the Vandenberg U.S. Space Force Base, about 275 km northwest of Los Angeles, to carry SWOT into orbit.

If all goes as planned, the SUV-sized satellite will produce research data within several months.

Nearly 20 years in development, SWOT incorporates advanced microwave radar technology that scientists say will collect height-surface measurements of oceans, lakes, reservoirs and rivers in high-definition detail over 90 per cent of the globe.

The data, compiled from radar sweeps of the planet at least twice every 21 days, will enhance ocean-circulation models, bolster weather and climate forecasts and aid in managing scarce freshwater supplies in drought-stricken regions, according to researchers.

The satellite was designed and built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles. Developed by the U.S. space agency in collaboration with its counterparts in France and Canada, SWOT was one of 15 missions listed by the National Research Council as projects NASA should undertake in the coming decade.

“It’s really the first mission to observe nearly all water on the planet’s surface,” said JPL scientist Ben Hamlington, who also leads NASA’s sea-level change team.

One major thrust of the mission is to explore how oceans absorb atmospheric heat and carbon dioxide in a natural process that moderates global temperatures and climate change.

Scanning the seas from orbit, SWOT is designed to precisely measure fine differences in surface elevations around smaller currents and eddies, where much the oceans’ drawdown of heat and carbon is believed to occur. And SWOT can do so with 10 times greater resolution than existing technologies, according to JPL.

Looking for oceans’ tipping point

Oceans are estimated to have absorbed more than 90 per cent of the excess heat trapped in Earth’s atmosphere by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

Studying the mechanism by which that happens will help climate scientists answer a key question: “What is the turning point at which oceans start releasing, rather than absorbing, huge amounts of heat back into the atmosphere and accelerate global warming, rather than limiting it?” said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, SWOT’s program scientist at NASA in Washington.

SWOT’s ability to discern smaller surface features also be used to study the impact of rising ocean levels on coastlines.

More precise data along tidal zones would help predict how far storm-surge flooding may penetrate inland, as well as the extent of saltwater intrusion into estuaries, wetlands and underground aquifers.

Freshwater bodies are another key focus SWOT, equipped to observe the entire length of nearly all rivers wider than 100 metres, as well as more than one million lakes and reservoirs larger than 15 acres.

Taking inventory of Earth’s water resources repeatedly over SWOT’s three-year mission will enable researchers to better trace fluctuations in the planet’s rivers and lakes during seasonal changes and major weather events.

NASA’s SWOT freshwater science lead, Tamlin Pavelsky, said collecting such data was akin to “taking the pulse of the world’s water system, so we’ll be able to see when it’s racing and we’ll be able to see when it’s slow.”

SWOT’s radar instrument operates at the so-called Ka-band frequency of the microwave spectrum, allowing scans to penetrate cloud cover and darkness over wide swaths of the Earth. This enables scientists to accurately map their observations in two dimensions regardless of weather or time of day and to cover large geographic areas far more quickly than before.

By comparison, previous studies of water bodies relied on data taken at specific points, such as river or ocean gauges, or from satellites that can only track measurements along a one-dimensional line, requiring scientists to fill in data gaps through extrapolation.

“Rather than giving us a line of elevations, it’s giving us a map of elevations, and that’s just a total game changer,” Pavelsky said.

— Steve Gorman is a Reuters correspondent in Los Angeles.

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Researchers said on Thursday they planted seeds of a diminutive flowering weed called Arabidopsis thaliana in 12 small thimble-sized containers each bearing a gram of moon soil, more properly called lunar regolith, and watched as they sprouted and grew. Lunar regolith, with its sharp particles and lack of organic material, differs greatly from Earth soil, so it was unknown whether seeds would germinate.

“When we first saw that abundance of green sprouts cast over all of the samples, it took our breath away,” said horticultural sciences professor Anna-Lisa Paul, director of the University of Florida Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research and co-leader of the study published in the journal Communications Biology.

“Plants can grow in lunar regolith. That one simple statement is huge and opens the door to future exploration using resources in place on the moon and likely Mars,” Paul said.

Every seed germinated and there were no outward differences at the early stages of growth between those sown in the regolith — composed mostly of crushed basalt rocks — and seeds sown for comparative reasons in volcanic ash from Earth with similar mineral composition and particle size.

The regolith seeds, perhaps unsurprisingly, did less well than the comparison plants. They were slower to grow and generally littler, had more stunted roots and were more apt to exhibit stress-related traits such as smaller leaves and deep reddish black colouration not typical of healthy growth. They also showed gene activity indicative of stress, similar to plant reactions to salt, metal and oxidation.

“Even though plants could grow in the regolith, they had to work hard metabolically to do so,” Paul said.

To the researchers, the fact that they grew at all was remarkable. Study co-leader Rob Ferl, a University of Florida assistant vice-president for research, said he felt “joy at watching life do something that had never been done before.”

“Seeing plants grow is an achievement in that it says that we can go to the moon and grow our food, clean our air and recycle our water using plants the way we use them here on Earth. It is also a revelation in that it says that terrestrial life is not limited to Earth,” Ferl added.

Arabidopsis, also called thale cress, is widely used in scientific research, including previous experiments in orbit, owing to its speedy life cycle and a deep understanding of its genetics.

NASA made available 12 grams — just a few teaspoons — of regolith collected during the Apollo 11, Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 missions. The researchers planted three or four seeds in a dozen containers moistened with a nutrient solution, then placed them in a laboratory at about 73 F (23 C) under LED lights giving off a pink hue.

The seeds sprouted within three days. After about a week of growth, the researchers removed all but one plant from each container. The one was left to grow until it was 20 days old, with its leaves then harvested to assess gene activity.

The researchers also determined that regolith that had experienced longer exposure to cosmic rays and solar wind on the lunar surface was less hospitable to growth.

Earth plants could help people establish outposts in places like the moon and Mars, as depicted in the 2015 film The Martian when an astronaut grew potatoes on the Red Planet. NASA’s Artemis program envisions people returning to the moon’s surface in the coming years.

“Plants are deeply embedded in the science of space exploration because of their life-support role, especially when we consider leaving the Earth for extended periods of time,” Ferl said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Will Dunham.

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The data compiled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA also revealed that the last eight years were the eight hottest and the last decade was the warmest since record-keeping began in 1880, officials said.

Global warming is “very real. It’s now, and it’s impacting real people,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview. Last year’s extreme heat wave in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, intense rains from Hurricane Ida and flooding in Germany and China were linked to global warming, he said.

A key indicator of climate change, the heat content of the world’s oceans, reached a record level in 2021, the agencies said. Oceans absorb more than 90 per cent of the excess heat trapped in the earth’s atmosphere by greenhouse gases, and those warmer waters influence weather patterns and changes in currents.

“What’s scientifically interesting about that is it tells us why the planet is warming,” Schmidt said. “It’s warming because of our impacts on greenhouse gas concentrations.”

According to NOAA, 2021 average temperatures were 1.51 F, or 0.84 C, above the 20th-century average, putting it just ahead of 2018. NASA’s analysis, which uses a 30-year baseline period, showed 2021 temperatures tied with 2018 as the sixth-warmest year.

The greatest warming occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, both on land and in the Arctic. The Arctic is warming more than three times faster than the global mean, the agencies said.

In an overview of its report earlier this week, NOAA said last year was the fourth-warmest on record for the United States.

— Reporting for Reuters by Nichola Groom.

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