Sun Blasts Another CME At Earth and Mars

'ranking system for CME/EMP effects'... 'all the way up to X5'?

Wow. Well, what you're talking about is the 'Flare Class' [spaceweather.com] which only classifies the amount of x-ray energy given off by a flare. It's a log scale, so M is 10x as large as a C, and X is 10x as large as an M. Of course, there's no cap on it, and there have been X20 flares recorded. Of course, the sensors saturate, and as we're only really dealing with one significant figure and a magnitude, I don't know how much precision they have at those higher values.

To make things even more fun, there's also a flare 'importance' value [spaceweather.com], which is based on the energy and size of the flaring region in the optical (visible) spectrum.

But neither of these classifications have to do with CMEs, and particularly not their affects at earth. For that, you'd need to look at the solar wind folks, who are obsessed with things like 'Bz' (z-component of the magnetic field', ie, how is it oriented relative to the earth's magnetic field?) [swri.edu] and radio bursts [nasa.gov].

The closest thing that I can think of to what you describe would be a catalog of ICMEs [ucla.edu] (Interplanetary CMEs), but even those, if you look at the catalog, are just raw numbers, no sort of ranking to it. (the column with 'A' and 'B' in it are which of the two STEREO spacecraft [nasa.gov] saw the event, 'Ahead' or 'Behind')

Disclaimer : I'm not a solar physicist, but I work in a solar data archive, and have done work trying to normalize solar event catalogs.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/2DL13_iBvvo/sun-blasts-another-cme-at-earth-and-mars

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