What exactly is a solar storm and what do they cause?

Today we’re under a 99% chance of a solar storm right now.  While some say the high potential for a solar storm is related to the sudden appearance of Category 5 hurricanes this season, there really isn’t any scientific evidence to back that up.

The definition of a Solar Storm below was copied and pasted directly from this NASA Web site:

https://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/a10624.html

If you want to read more about them or read other great article, visit their web site.

 

“What are solar storms and how do they affect the Earth?”

Solar storms are a variety of eruptions of mass and energy from the solar surface. Flares, prominences, sunspots, coronal mass ejections are the common harbingers of solar activity, as are plages and other related phenomena seen at other wavelengths. They all involve sudden releases of stored magnetic energy, which accelerates the hot gases near the surface or in the corona of the Sun. Sometimes these particles make it all the way to the Earth and beyond by flowing along the Sun's magnetic field into interplanetary space. When the material collides with the Earth's magnetic field and trapped radiation belts, it can dump particles into our upper atmosphere to cause the Aurora. The same 'charged' particles can produce their own magnetic fields which can modify the Earth's magnetic field and affect compass readings. The changing magnetic fields can also 'induce' electricity in long pipelines, or produce electrical surges in our power grids leading to brown outs and black outs.