‘Solar storm’ knocks out GPS signals over weekend

Don’t adjust your TV sets. That really was a GPS outage over the weekend as a ‘solar storm’ rolled through the atmosphere.

“Time to freehand the field,” wrote Wawanesa, Man., farmer Simon Ellis in a post on X on Friday. “At least this field isn’t against the highway.”

Responses to his post suggested farmers in Kansas, Central Saskatchewan, and Rivers, Man., were also having issues.

Via text, Ellis said as he switched fields on Friday, he noticed his GPS wasn’t matching up.

“Initially there were large misses or large over lap. Up to half the air seeder width,” he said. “That was with the auto steer engaged.”

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Ellis said he uses the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS). By Saturday, the issues had mostly smoothed out, he added.

The New York Times reported yesterday that farmers across the American Midwest had also suffered from GPS outages, with some having to halt seeding entirely.

On Friday, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration put out a media bulletin warning that it was following a series of solar flares and coronal mass ejections that had begun on May 8. It warned that the storm conditions could last throughout the weekend.

Coronal mass ejections are “explosions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun’s corona,” NOAA said. “They cause geomagnetic storms when they are directed at Earth. Geomagnetic storms can impact infrastructure in near-Earth orbit and on Earth’s surface, potentially disrupting communications, the electric power grid, navigation, radio and satellite operations.”

The solar activity also caused brilliant aurora borealis, or “northern lights” to be visible Friday night.

NOAA alerts as late as today suggested the solar activity was ongoing.

Farmers using WAAS may see further interruption to their signal as the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which administers the civilian-use GPS network, had plans to switch one of its WAAS satellites into test mode starting yesterday and lasting until June 7. Its other two satellites remain in operation.