How the 2024 solar superstorm drained Earth's radiation belt

In May 2024, Earth experienced its most intense geomagnetic storm since the Halloween storms of 2003. This "superstorm" filled night skies in many parts of the world with colorful aurorae, and it disrupted some infrastructure, such as GPS.

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Credit: Paul Taylor/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 In May 2024, Earth experienced its most intense geomagnetic storm since the Halloween storms of 2003.

Satellite observations revealed that during the storm, Earth's outer Van Allen radiation belt underwent a sudden, dramatic loss of highly energetic electrons. Xingzhi Lyu and colleagues now report the first comprehensive analysis of how this rapid electron transport occurred, with key implications for future space weather forecasting.

The Van Allen radiation belts are donut-shaped rings that encircle our planet and harbor energetic electrons and protons, mostly from the solar wind, trapped by Earth's magnetosphere. The May 2024 superstorm presented a rare opportunity to study this phenomenon.

They found that two previously studied processes were the primary drivers of the electron loss: magnetopause shadowing, which transported electrons outward and released them into space, and local wave scattering, which moved electrons inward into Earth's upper atmosphere. The relative dominance of each process differed in different regions of Earth's magnetic field.

Importantly, for the simulations to accurately reproduce the real-world extreme electron loss, the onset of sudden, outward electron transport associated with magnetopause shadowing had to occur nearly simultaneously with a strong compression of Earth's magnetosphere that.

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