"The short answer to this is absolutely. The possibility of an extreme CME causing a very powerful geomagnetic storm is real. There's considerable uncertainty to how frequent such storms are at the level where we worry about huge impacts on the power grid and the resulting impacts that a lack of electricity would have. Is it a one in 50, one in 100, or one in 1,000 year event? We just don't know," Doug Biesecker of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center, told Astrowatch.net.
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However, as Biesecker said, these are still in the speculative regime of science, with many of the efforts as yet unfunded, and much more that needs to be done, including finding techniques to quantify the magnetic field, before we can hope to use any of it for forecasting the influence on Earth.
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2016-03-powerful-geomagnetic-storms-solar.html#jCp