[ RadSafe ] Solar storm of December 13 (GMT)

[Robert Barish]

Esteemed Colleagues:

As someone who considers himself an expert on in-flight radiation (see the Radsafe archives) I'd like to let Dr. Tremblay and the list know that the coronal mass ejection last week did indeed influence the dose rate that would be measured on airplanes. In fact this particular "hiccup" from the sun produced a measurable increase at the network of neutron monitoring stations located in places such as Thule Greenland and Moscow Russia thus qualifying it as a Ground Level Event (GLE) It certainly impacted the astronauts performing the current shuttle mission as well as tickling passengers on "red eye" flights from LA to NY.

The "Spaceship Earth" project run from the University of Delaware collects the data from multiple ground stations and allows access to the data to any interested person.

To see the spike in the ground-level count rates, take a look at:

http://neutronm.bartol.udel.edu/solmin_gle.jpg

Regards for the holidays,

Robert Barish, CHP