Sun may be behind our wicked weatherThor’s hammer is something that electrical engineers would love to have. Today’s technology does not have a material that can sustain the power of a lightening bolt. When Thor calls on lightening and stomps like thunder with Mjölnir, the concept is his hammer is made of magic and a material that must be magnetically in tuned with electrical energy.

In some parts of the universe, the electromagnetic waveform is emitted by stars.

Satellites in space can catch patterns from these stars. Our sun recently revealed its ability to hurl lightening towards the United Kingdom by magnetically bending the Earth’s magnetosphere and letting charged particles run their course through the upper atmosphere.

Researchers from England’s University of Reading realized this was due to the heliospheric magnetic field (HMF). Earth and the sun have magnetic fields that shove one another for their own space. Like siblings fighting for the same land, they both want to occupy a geometry plane found 3 degrees into the equator of the sun where the Earth revolves.

The span of the sun’s magnetic field is superior to the Earth’s. At the times when it influences lightening the most, the sun’s magnetic field is facing away from the Earth. This causes the Earth’s magnetosphere to follow the direction of the HMF, which in turn, causes the magnetic fields protecting the Earth to become thin and even break around global locations.

There is a fascinating thing about the Earth’s position relative to the sun, though. Because the planet revolves around the sun, as opposed to being stationary like the sun, it always has to compensate for the hot and cold dynamics forming on the planet as temperatures change when energy flows in or out by pressure changes. In other words, daytime and night time or simply a rotation. This is what the First Law of Thermodynamics is all about.

Isobars are used in meteorology to define weather patterns. Fred Hafer’s oceanography class at SWC explores how hot temperatures move to a right angle against the cold. On Earth this effect created the conveyor belt system which circulates the ocean currents.

Scientists long ago figured out that this natural right angle effect actually creates a spin. Soon after, the vortex was discovered. Modern meteorology was created when the math of all these right angles began making sense about the larger structures in the atmosphere such as currents and storms.

Hot follows cold and the way cold flows dictates how hot follows. In Hinduism, a samsara is to go full circle. In the Marvel universe, Thor takes his hammer by the strap and twirls it in the air. Hurricanes twirl in air and they come with lighting and thunder.

In October, Hurricane Patricia smashed Mexico, Olaf appeared in Hawaii and the islands in Micronesia had a potential typhoon forming at the same time.

At the time of these events, five powerful electromagnetic storms occurred on the equator of the sun. These were caused by sunspot episodes, during a time the Earth is under solar minima, which means the sun had not been producing many sunspots at all. As the coldest areas of the sun, sunspots naturally repel the hot solar surface and jet all the surface energy with a right hook up into the atmosphere, accelerating the energy particles further and faster into space. Any solar activity headed towards the same plane of the Earth increases the likelihood of direct impact.

Unfortunately, if Loki, the evil brother of Thor, had to show up, it would be here. Solar physics can seem counterintuitive within nature. Not everything is what it seems. There are currently no weather models that take into account the geophysical properties of sun along with the data of Earth’s climate and chemistry in real time.  It is a work in progress that dates back to Galileo.

In 2015, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and U.S. Air Force launched a deep space climate observatory (DSCOVR) satellite operating with sensors facing the sun and the Earth at the same time. It hopes to unlock some mysteries and secrets of our universe…maybe even how Thor’s hammer works.