scope:

Description of Driving Event:

On April 7, 1997 a solar flare occurred with an associated coronal mass ejection and a "coronal Moreton wave." These phenomena were seen in new and spectacular ways by instruments aboard the NASA/ESA SOHO spacecraft. NASA, ESA, and NRL scientists queried by the media were excited, and their excitement about the new observations led to media reports that a massive ejection had left the Sun (true), it would hit the Earth (highly probable), at a certain time (wrong), and cause damage and outages to technical systems (highly unlikely.) Meantime, NOAA's Space Environment Center (SEC), utilizing primarily the same types of data with which we have become familiar over the last several solar cycles, regarded the flare (C6 in soft x-rays and 3N in H-alpha) to be ordinary, the coronal mass ejection to be the expected garden variety, time of transit to Earth through slow solar wind to be long, and the terrestrial effects likely to be unremarkable.

The unprecedented media saturation and attention gives to this event, and the "NASA predictions" (which NASA scientists did not make) appearing as an official government warning, caused many systems operators to be severely shaken, As on example, NOAA's Space Environment Center had a call asking if 747s scheduled to fly across the Atlantic should be kept on the ground at the predicted time of arrival of the storm.

This lessons learned document appeared in the June 1997, International STEP Newsletter, Vol. 3, No. 2 and was written by:

Ernest Hildner, Director, SEC

Art Poland, Project Scientist, SOHO

Nicola Fox, ISTP