Solar Flares Are Out To Get Your GPS Signal

According to this BBC News article, our sun is about to enter a period of maximum activity on its surface, meaning more solar flares, meaning more disruption in the upper parts of the Earth’s atmosphere. And all of that translates to bad news for GPS and anyone who relies on satellite signals for navigation. The effect could be as small as making your GPS receiver a few feet off when determining where you are (I guess drivers will have to go back to reading street signs) to satellite blindness that could last hours or even days.

Of course, these effects are apparently “difficult to predict,”and researchers are going on data from the last solar maximum. The article doesn’t suggest there should be panic in the streets just yet. Commercial GPS users may be inconvenienced, but things are a bit more dire for the industrial sector.

For instance, sat-nav is used to help bring ships safely into harbor. “You might find for a number of hours or even a day or two you… [won't] be able to dock your oil tanker at the deep-ocean oil well,” Bob Cockshott, a director of the government-funded Digital Systems Knowledge Transfer Network, told BBC News. Yikes.

It will take a few years for the sun to reach its solar maximum and hopefully during this time researchers and GPS manufacturers will figure out a way to counteract it.