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The 1974 horror film "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" kicks off with brilliant footage of solar flares and descends into violence and mayhem. While there's no evidence to suggest an actual link between increased solar activity and human violence, it can result in a great deal of earthbound devastation -- from city-destroying hurricanes to massive energy failures.
Two types of solar phenomena can affect the Earth in such a drastic manner: solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Scientists think that both types of events are caused by changes in the sun's magnetic field.
ANALYSIS: A solar storm could be responsible for some serious cable television interference after knocking out one of our vulnerable communications satellites in April.
In the case of solar flares, the magnetic field triggers a powerful explosion in the sun's atmosphere. This explosion accelerates subatomic particles near the speed of light, producing a broad range of electromagnetic radiation.
Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) on the other hand, involve the ejection of actual material from the sun's corona. Billions of tons of electrified gas fly away from the sun at incredibly high speeds.
"Those are the two kinds of space weather that have a direct effect on Earth," explains NASA solar astrophysicist C. Alex Young.
To understand how space weather affects Earth weather, you first have to understand how the sun churns our atmosphere into motion.
"Because we're on a sphere, the sun heats up the equatorial regions more than the poles," explains Dr. Jeff Masters of Weather Underground, "so the Earth has to develop circulations to distribute the heat. This keeps the equator from getting hotter and hotter and the poles from getting colder and colder. The Earth's trying to balance out this uneven distribution of heat."
As the sun can only heat a portion of the globe at any given time, Earth's rotation causes additional east-to-west wind patterns to form. Weather as a whole comes down to the global circulation of hot and cold air. An increase in solar weather can result in an increase in the solar energy to reach the Earth's atmosphere. We can anticipate these changes by analyzing sunspots, which follow an 11-year cycle. An increase in sunspots signifies an increase in solar weather.
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