NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center issued a moderate (G2) geomagnetic storm watch for August 28–29 after an M6.9 solar flare erupted from sunspot region 4513 on August 25, sending a coronal mass ejection toward Earth. The result, for most people, will be nothing more than a chance of aurora visible unusually far south — NOAA's forecast maps put possible sightings as far down as New York, Wisconsin, and Washington state. It's also a useful moment to separate what a "solar storm" headline actually implies from what most people picture when they hear about EMPs and grid collapse.
What the G-scale actually measures
NOAA rates geomagnetic storms on a five-level scale, G1 through G5, based on how strongly a disturbance in Earth's magnetic field is likely to affect satellites, radio signals, and power infrastructure. A G1 (minor) storm might cause weak fluctuations in power systems and little else. G2 (moderate) — this week's rating — can trigger voltage alarms at high-latitude power stations and, if sustained for a long duration, some transformer stress, but it's not an event grid operators consider a genuine threat. G3 (strong) can force voltage corrections. It's only at G4 (severe) and G5 (extreme) that NOAA's own descriptions start including widespread voltage control problems, transformer damage, and the possibility of actual blackouts. Almost everything reported as a "solar storm" in a given year, including this week's watch, sits at the low end of that scale.
What a genuinely severe storm looks like
The most recent severe event was the May 2024 storm, later named the "Gannon" storm in honor of Dr. Jennifer Gannon, a space weather physicist who died shortly before it hit. It reached G5 — a level not seen since October 2003 — and produced widely visible aurora across the US and measurable geomagnetically induced currents in power infrastructure. The practical damage was real but narrow. In its own review, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation — the body responsible for US and Canadian grid reliability — found that the bulk power system "remained stable and largely unaffected" through the full three-day event, even as conditions ranged from strong (G3) to extreme (G5); operators reported isolated effects on some large transformers, voltage equipment, and circuit breakers, but no blackout. The clearest financial damage actually showed up in agriculture: GPS-guided tractors across the Midwest, at the peak of spring planting, lost positioning accuracy for hours, and researchers later put the resulting losses to farmers at more than $500 million. That's the actual baseline for what a top-of-scale event has looked like in the modern grid era: real, measurable, and still well short of the collapse scenarios that circulate whenever a flare makes headlines.
Why this keeps happening right now
The sun runs on a roughly 11-year activity cycle, and NASA and NOAA's joint solar cycle panel determined that Solar Cycle 25 reached its maximum around October 2024. That means the sun is now in the gradual declining phase of the cycle — but "declining" doesn't mean quiet. Strong flares and CMEs, like this week's M6.9 event, continue to occur through the downslope of a cycle; they simply become somewhat less frequent over the next several years rather than stopping outright. Expect geomagnetic storm watches to keep showing up in the news through the rest of this cycle, most of them minor or moderate, in the same pattern as this week's.
Where the real risk sits for ordinary preparedness
None of this means severe space weather isn't worth planning around — it means the planning should be scaled to the right event. A G4 or G5 storm can degrade GPS accuracy for hours — as it did for Midwest farm equipment in 2024 — disrupt high-frequency radio propagation (relevant if you rely on HF for emergency communications), and, in the worst documented cases, damage specific transformers rather than the grid broadly. That's a real but narrow risk, and it's already covered by the same fundamentals as any other grid-down scenario: backup lighting and power, a battery radio that doesn't depend on satellite signal, and a plan that doesn't assume GPS or cell data will be available. There's no separate "EMP kit" that a G2 watch like this week's calls for, and treating every solar flare headline as an imminent collapse risk is its own kind of unpreparedness — it trains people to tune out the warnings that matter.
The information angle people miss
Where solar storms do connect to a gap most people haven't planned for is information access. A severe event doesn't just threaten the power grid — GPS degradation and HF radio disruption both interfere with how emergency information and navigation get relayed when normal channels are already stressed. If a genuinely severe storm coincided with a regional power outage, the same information most people now reach exclusively through a phone — reference material, manuals, contact details, basic medical and technical guides — would be exactly as unreachable as it is during any other extended outage. That's not really a solar storm problem specifically; it's the same underlying dependency on always-on connectivity that shows up in every grid-down scenario. Having key reference material stored somewhere that doesn't depend on a satellite signal, a cell tower, or an internet connection is a small, one-time fix for a gap that a rare severe storm would simply expose along with everything else.
For this week, the practical takeaway is simple: if you're somewhere the aurora might be visible Friday or Saturday night, it's worth stepping outside after dark. The grid isn't at risk from a G2 watch, and it wasn't seriously at risk from the strongest storm in two decades, either. The value in paying attention to these events isn't bracing for a collapse that these storms don't actually produce — it's understanding, calmly and correctly, where the real threshold for concern actually sits.