SPE data for solar cycles 19-21

[Luke Pemberton]

I have been sitting on numerous documents regarding solar physics. I was originally going to produce a website (about 8 years ago). Jay had an initial look and gave my initial ideas a nod, but life kind of changed. Sorry for wasting your time Jay.

One of my documents collates solar proton events for Solar Cycles 19-21. I hope this is a useful rebuttal of 'killer solar flares.'

When thinking about solar radiation there is a lot to wade through. This is mainly due to the changes in terminology.

• Initial terminology - Solar events were exclusively called solar flares.
• Developing terminology - Distinction between flares and solar proton events
• Modern terminology - Solar flares, low speed CMEs, solar particle events (SPEs) - gradual shock driven events consisting mainly of high energy protons, impulsive particle events consisting mainly of electrons.

Gradual SPEs are like a blunderbuss (spread across a front), impulsive SPEs are like a sniper rifle (highly directional, so don't always hit Earth).

I have attached a list of proton events that cover Apollo missions beyond LEO. There was a proton event during Apollo 16. However, if you look at the data for this year it does not correspond to an event detected on the ground (GLE). A ground event is more likely correlated to a shock driven halo-CME that produces relativistic protons, and would have presented a problem to the astronauts. The solar proton event during Apollo 16 was not a GLE.

In any case, not all solar proton events are identical because the magnetic field of the sun is an Archimedean screw, so not all solar protons events are directed at Earth. It is likely that the Apollo proton event is due to the coincidence of the Earth with the extremities of the the proton flux or the CME speed was less than the threshold for a shock driven proton solar storm.

I have some other data for proton events. I need to check that data with the data here. This would be more of an internal check as the other data simply counts the number of events for each year of a solar cycle. As solar cycles do not start on 1st January, there will be some differences in the representation of the data.

I was not sure how to embed the images, so they are attached.

[bknight]

I wished you would have posted this about 2-5 years ago, because there was a HB spouting that there were SPE's during Apollo.  He(She) produced a slick video pointed at Jay IIRC, "proving" that SPEs occurred during Apollo.  I believe that Jay responded yes but none that were dangerous to astronauts.  Clearly a definition problem what is considered a dangerous event outside the VARB and those that are not dangerous.  To a normal HB ANY SPE is bad, similar to the blunder's idea of the VARB and a few(socks) here and CQ that are all grouped to one individual Tim Finch, ex electrician on nuclear subs.  He suffers from a similar issue as najak with computation.  He also had issues with BobB's radiation page while comparing values recorded with Chaing4 versus Apollo.

[Luke Pemberton]

I wished you would have posted this about 2-5 years ago, because there was a HB spouting that there were SPE's during Apollo.

That would have been a no-can-do from me. I stopped posting here in December 2018. Intially for personal/medical reasons and then for professional reasons. I only picked it up again recently.

He(She) produced a slick video pointed at Jay IIRC, "proving" that SPEs occurred during Apollo.  I believe that Jay responded yes but none that were dangerous to astronauts.

It's thanks to people like Jay and his profession that we have spacecraft that are able to advance our understanding of space weather. I always find it odd that they throw mud at the very people that have progressed the technology they use every day.

Clearly a definition problem what is considered a dangerous event outside the VARB and those that are not dangerous. To a normal HB ANY SPE is bad, similar to the blunder's idea of the VARB and a few(socks) here and CQ that are all grouped to one individual...

It is worse than that, they have not progressed beyond flares are dangerous and equate flares to solar storms (shock driven halo-CMEs). I have three things to say: (1) IMDb (2) Jay (3) Calculus

Tim Finch...

He of log scale, exponential scale, exponent fame. I remember it well. Probably the only thread where I did some real donkey work.

[Luke Pemberton]

Finally, from another paper. I have boxed the Apollo 16 proton event in black and the August 72 proton event in red. Compare the Apollo 16 proton event with the August 72 event, the latter event has a peak flux >60000 and is recorded as GLE.

Jay might wish to cast his mind back to the IMBd and the H-alpha issue. The table describes the H-alpha flares as "ASSOCIATED". The use of quotation marks indicates that proton events do not necessarily have accompanying H-alpha flares. What I find interesting from the perspective of the IMBd discussion is that the flare during the August 72 proton event is classed as 2B, but less significant proton events have flares classed as 3B. I think this demonstrates the point you were making many years ago with your question 'what is the correlation between H-alpha and proton fluence?'

[bknight]

What I found most depressing concerning Tim is the value for radiation was less than .24 m g/y(IIRC), which was an average number, and he thought it was a minimum for some reason and therefore could not have been achieved unless it was in LEO.  We all tried to tell him that .24 m g/y was an average number with values both greater than and less than were totally within reason.  Then he doubled down with ok, maybe for one mission but all missions?  Yes Henretta that is how numbers work, strange isn't it?  And Apollo flew to the Moon during several mission, landing during six of them.

[Jason Thompson]

What I found most depressing concerning Tim is the value for radiation was less than .24 m g/y(IIRC), which was an average number, and he thought it was a minimum for some reason and therefore could not have been achieved unless it was in LEO.  We all tried to tell him that .24 m g/y was an average number with values both greater than and less than were totally within reason.  Then he doubled down with ok, maybe for one mission but all missions?  Yes Henretta that is how numbers work, strange isn't it?  And Apollo flew to the Moon during several mission, landing during six of them.

Good lord his inability to understand that an average is not a minimum was staggering, as was his insistence of focusing on 2-dimensional representations and an inability to grasp that 3-dimensions change things dramatically, even when shown a simple cardboard model of the situation. I remember getting quite dogged with that one, mainly because it coincided with a time when I was being made redundant from the job I'd had for 13 years, so I had a lot of nervous energy that needed to go somewhere....