Ground Effects of Space Weather

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Ground Effects of Space Weather

Space weather effects on electric power transmission grids and pipelines

Pirjola, Risto / Viljanen, Ari / Pulkkinen, Antti / Kilpua, Sami / Amm, Olaf

Space storms produce geomagnetically induced currents (GIC) in technological systems at the Earth’s surface, such as electric power transmission grids, pipelines, communication cables and railways. Thus GIC are the ground end of the space weather chain originating from the Sun. The first GIC observations were already made in early telegraph equipment about 150 years ago, and since then several different systems have experienced problems during large magnetic storms. Physically, GIC are driven by the geoelectric field induced by a geomagnetic variation. The electric and magnetic fields are primarily created by magnetospheric-ionospheric currents and secondarily influenced by currents induced in the Earth that are affected by the ground conductivity. The most violent magnetic variations occur in auroral regions, which indicates that GIC are a particular high-latitude problem but lower-latitude systems can also experience GIC problems. In power networks, GIC may cause saturation of transformers with harmful consequences extending from harmonics in the electricity to large reactive power consumption and even to a collapse of the system or to permanent damage of transformers. In pipelines, GIC and the associated pipe-to-soil voltages can enhance corrosion and disturb corrosion control measurements and protection. Modelling techniques of GIC are discussed in this paper. Having information about the Earth’s conductivity and about space currents o the ground magnetic field, a GIC calculation contains two steps: the determination of the geoelectric field and the computation of GIC in the

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Document information

Title :

Ground Effects of Space Weather

Subtitle :

Space weather effects on electric power transmission grids and pipelines

Contributors:

Daglis, Ioannis A. (editor) / Pirjola, Risto (author) / Viljanen, Ari (author) / Pulkkinen, Antti (author) / Kilpua, Sami (author) / Amm, Olaf (author)

Published in:

Effects of Space Weather on Technology Infrastructure ; Chapter : 13 ; 235-256

NATO Science Series II: Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry ; 176

Publication date :

2005-01-01

Size :

22 pages

ISBN :

978-1-4020-2754-3 , 978-1-4020-2748-2

ISSN :

1568-2609

DOI :