New NASA study says solar storm effects on Earth may have no upper limit
A NASA-led paper published in Nature suggests there may be no ceiling to how intensely Earth responds to solar storms, meaning space weather could hit our technology harder than models assumed. The team analyzed more than a million solar wind measurements. Reported by NASA and Nature.
A NASA-led study published in Nature challenges decades of thinking about space weather. Scientists have long believed there is an upper limit to how strongly Earth's upper atmosphere responds to solar storms, but the new paper argues that apparent ceiling is an illusion created by measurement uncertainty. Most solar wind readings come from spacecraft positioned about a million miles closer to the Sun than Earth, which statistically makes the wind reaching Earth look weaker than it is. Analyzing more than a million measurements from NASA probes closer to Earth, such as the MMS and THEMIS missions, the team led by Nithin Sivadas of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center found the currents driven in the upper atmosphere kept rising with solar wind strength, with no cap. If confirmed, extreme storms could pose greater risks to satellites, power grids, navigation signals and radiation exposure than current models assume. Source: NASA, Nature (Sivadas et al., 2026).