May 2024 geomagnetic storm
The first geomagnetic storm at the top of the scale since 2003, which degraded satellite navigation and low orbits without causing a major outage.
A geomagnetic storm starts with coronal mass ejections that compress the Earth's magnetic field: it disturbs the ionosphere that navigation signals pass through and heats the upper atmosphere, which drags on low-orbit satellites and throws off their trajectory calculations. The May 2024 episode reached the top of the US scale, which had not happened in more than twenty years. Damage stayed limited, but it reached sectors not usually associated with space: precision agriculture, whose satellite-guided tractors lost accuracy at planting time, and debris tracking, whose catalogs had to be recomputed. The event now serves as a benchmark for extreme storm scenarios: it shows what a severe storm does without destruction, and therefore everything a storm on the scale of 1859 would add.
On May 10 and 11, 2024, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration rated the storm G5, the highest level, for the first time since October 2003; farmers in the Midwest paused planting for lack of precise satellite guidance.
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