Occurrence of Great Magnetic Storms on 6-8 March 1582

Abstract

Although knowing the occurrence frequency of severe space weather events is important for a modern society, it is insufficiently known due to the lack of magnetic or sunspot observations, before the Carrington event in 1859 known as one of the largest events during the last two centuries. Here, we show that a severe magnetic storm occurred on 8 March 1582 based on auroral records in East Asia. The equatorward boundary of auroral visibility reached 28.8° magnetic latitude. The equatorward boundary of the auroral oval is estimated to be 33.0° invariant latitude (ILAT), which is comparable to the storms on 25/26 September 1909 (~31.6° ILAT, minimum Dst of -595 nT), 28/29 August 1859 (~36.5° ILAT), and 13/14 March 1989 (~40° ILAT, minimum Dst of -589 nT). Assuming that the equatorward boundary is a proxy for the scale of magnetic storms, we presume that the storm on March 1582 was severe. We also found that the storm on March 1582 lasted, at least, for three days by combining European records. The auroral oval stayed at mid-latitude for the first two days and moved to low-latitude (in East Asia) for the last day. It is plausible that the storm was caused by a series of ICMEs (interplanetary coronal mass ejections). We can reasonably speculate that a first ICME could have cleaned up interplanetary space to make the following ICMEs more geo-effective, as probably occurred in the Carrington and Halloween storms.

Accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society; main text 10 pages, reference 5 pages, appendix 4 pages, 2 tables, and 6 figures

References in corpus (12)

• Long-Lasting Extreme Magnetic Storm Activities in 1770 Found in Historical Documents
• A homogeneous aa index: 1. Secular variation
• A homogeneous aa index: 2. hemispheric asymmetries and the equinoctial variation
• East Asian Observations of Low Latitude Aurora during the Carrington Magnetic Storm
• A Comparative Study of 2017 July and 2012 July Complex Eruptions: Are Solar Superstorms "Perfect Storms" in Nature?
• The earliest drawings of datable auroras and a two-tail comet from the Syriac Chronicle of Zūqnīn
• Historical Auroras in the 990s: Evidence for Great Magnetic Storms
• Do the Chinese Astronomical Records Dated AD 776 January 12/13 Describe an Auroral Display or a Lunar Halo? A Critical Re-examination
• Occurrence of Great Magnetic Storms on 6-8 March 1582
• Earliest Datable Records of Aurora-like Phenomena in the Astronomical Diaries from Babylonia
• Aurora Candidates from the Chronicle of Qīng Dynasty in Several Degrees of Relevance
• The Celestial Sign in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the 770s: Insights on Contemporary Solar Activity

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Extreme solar events
• The Dalton Minimum and John Dalton's Auroral Observations
• Occurrence of Great Magnetic Storms on 6-8 March 1582
• The Extreme Space Weather Event of 1872 February: Sunspots, Magnetic Disturbance, and Auroral Displays
• The intensity and evolution of the extreme storms in January 1938
• Portuguese eyewitness accounts of the great space weather event of 1582