The Progress-Index from Petersburg, Virginia • A12

LUDLOWMARG CYAN MAGENTA BLACK A12 The Progress-Index, Petersburg, Va. WEATHER Sunday, March 2, 2014 PLPROGINDEXPAGES A12 I 030114 20:08 Sunday, March 2, 2014 Noon 5 P.M. Shown are noon positions of weather systems and precipitation. Temperature bands are highs tor the day. 71 ers -laalult 62 67 Monday Tuesday Wednesday 40714765 4171975 4872975 Rain mixing with Partly sunny and Plenty of sunshine ice, snow, up to 1 breezy POP: Probability of Precipitation.

RF: The patented AccuWeather.com RealFeel Temperature' is an exclusive index that combines the effects of temperature, wind, humidity, sunshine intensity, cloudiness, precipitation, pressure and elevation on the human body everything that affects how warm or cold a person feels. Sunshine; nice RF: 66 10 P.M. 57 Overcast Partly sunny RF: 64 7 A.M. Monday 48 Cloudy; hf hurehiii Calgary 3, A SJohjiVi Vancouver -hA16 Saskatoon 20n? I iiiilPvvtSWL Montreal Wy7 BillinasSNl Minneapolis Toronto 3710; I A Cold Iron! rntDenver ffl'H'tY Warmlront SanFranclsco l-jJKr 171 Washington aAA. il Loa Angeles 1 mZ-, V-i I Showersrn v'PiiRJJ RainH La Paz I MorrterreyMBKA V81B9 icef 1 82(H) 14 "-jiJ- l-JJ breezy Statistics for Tri-Cities through 6 p.m.

yest. Temperature Yesterday's highlow 52722 Normal highlow 55733 Record high 80 (1976) Record low 11 (1937) Precipitation 24 hrs. ending 6 p.m. yest. 0.00" Month to date 0.00" Normal month to date 0.11" Year to date 6.31 Normal year to date 5.91 Record precip.

0.93" (2009) Bedford Columbus Colonial Heights 4218 York 2815 6836 3919 Chesterfield Winchester Baltimore ease jj Petersburg Moorefield 5829 6938 Prince George 5421 Ashland a 6736 Charlottesville 4629 Dmwiddie 6328 6739 Lynchburg Bluefield 6335 Virginia 5933 Roanoke Danville Beach 6337 6746 6241 Bristol Emporia 6343 Raleiah 6840 Greensboro tt Asheville 6548 Nags Head 6543 5950 ft. Charlotte Fayetteville 6849 a. 6950 New Bern Spartanburg 6752 7048 Columbia 7349 Myrtle Beach Shown is today's weather. 6654 Temperatures are today's highs and tonight's lows. Base Ski Trails Ski Area (in) Code Open Katie Matt John Tim Dupree DiNardo Bernier Pandajis 8News Stormtracker Weather Team Enjoy this beautiful day while it's here! The warmth will be very brief.

Clouds build throughout the day, but highs will reach into the middle to upper 60s. Winds are SW at 5-15 mph. Tonight, we'll see rain move in after midnight, with a low around freezing. Monday looks a bit messy. We'll see sleet take over just in time for the Monday morning commute.

Sleet lasts through late morning, and then eventually a change to snow by early afternoon. Snow accumulations in the Petersburg area will be 1-3 inches by Monday night, with closer to 4 inches plus for Metro Richmond. Massanutten (VA) 46-46 mgr 12 Appomattox River 1st HighLow 2nd HighLow Petersburg Bermuda Hundred Haxall James River City Point Curies (1 mile north) Richmond (River Burwell Bay Jamestown Island Chickahominy River Ferry Point Lanexa Mattaponi River Wakema Walkerton Pamunkey River Sweet Hall Landing Lester Manon Piakatank River Cherry Point Jackson Creek Potomac River Coles Point Colonial Beach Rappahannock River Urbanna Bowlers Rock Tappahannock Yeocomico River Lynch Point Kinsale York River Yorktown West Point Chesapeake Bay West Smith Point Light Great Wicomico Dividing Creek Mobjack Bay East River Entrance Other VA, NC Points CapeHatteras Cape Henry Duck Pier Fisherman Island Kitty Hawk Oregon Inlet Wintergreen (VA) 50-60 pp 25 Bryce(VA) 55-65 pp 8 Appalachian Ski (NC) 48-100 pp 12 Beech Mtn. (NC) 38-88 mgr 14 Sugar 38-88 mgr 20 Snowshoe (WV) 34-46 mgr 55 ns-new snow; pdr-powder; pp-packed powder; hp-hard pack; mgr-machine groomed; wetsn-wet snow; wps-wet packed snow; Isgr -loose granular. Source: Onttiesnow.com Sunrise today 6:38 a.m.

Sunset tonight 6:05 p.m. Moonrise today 7:13 a.m. Moonset today 7:57 p.m. KATIE DUPREE WRIC TV8 meteorologists make their forecasts independently from AccuWeather.com, which produces forecasts on this page. First Last New Full Mar 16 For the five-day forecast go to Forecasts and graphics, except the 8News Stormtracker forecast, provided by AccuWeather.com 2014 Marf Mar 23 Mar 30 23 Goodrich Avenue, Petersburg, VA 23805 infopetersburgdentalcare.com www.petersburgdentalcare.com A general dental office providing comprehensive care for children and adults.

Could a giant sunburst unplug Earth? Scientists look at different scenarios for solar flare ups JOHN SLEEZERKANSAS CITY STAR The transit of Venus can be seen against the setting sun as a black dot near the KCPL building in downtown Kansas City, from the upper deck of Kauffman Stadium on June 5, 2012. Act, passed the U.S. House in 2010 but never gained traction in the Senate. Since then, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has ordered utilities to assess their vulnerabilities and deliver plans. Topeka-based Westar Energy providing power to nearly 700,000 customers in the eastern third of Kansas, said the industry should proceed with caution.

"Let's figure out what we're trying to solve, first," said Tom Stuchlik, the utility's executive director of systems operations. Experts say solutions range from upgrades that keep power surges from spreading, to sheds that protect big transformers, to rockets at the ready to carry communications satellites into space, replacing a bunch of dead ones. "If a once-in-a-millennium event does come along, what can you do now that you know is going to work?" asked Allen Klassen, Westar's director of transmission systems operation. As with hurricanes, earthquakes and tornadoes, electromagnetic natural disasters are believed to threaten some areas of Earth more than others. Upper latitudes are more apt to get hit than places closer to the equator.

Grids near large bodies of salt water or atop heavy concentrations of granite are at higher risk too. The Midwest's location and subsoil conditions make a Carrington-style blackout less likely to spread, contend Westar and Plenty of other skeptics dismiss the doomsday scenario. Whether the perceived threat to our high-tech cocoon is tied to a source natural or nuclear, nonproliferation scholar Jeffrey Lewis of the Monterey Institute of International Studies recently told the Los Angeles Times: "People are saying these outlandish things that are not related to data. You get skeptical of them really quick." A 2009 study by the Nation-al Academy of Sciences warned that a massive geomagnetic assault on satellites and interconnected power grids could result in a blackout from which the nation may need four to 10 years to recover. Sound like Y2K? "The earth is in peril, and people love that," said Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine.

"There is this certain human fascination with disaster. "This one's a little eccentric. But given a world so interconnected and dependent on technology, with all our cellphones and computers, there's some legitimate scientific concern about this." Odds of an electronics Armageddon anytime soon are far from clear. Because solar storms occur regularly, with magnetic loops flaring and twisting around sunspots, government weather scientists say it's inevitable that Earth will, on rare occasion, get bonked by what they call a "coronal mass ejection," orCME. A cloud of solar plasma, depending on the magnetic makeup of its electrons, could penetrate and shake the planet's magnetic field, if the sun's aim is just so.

Some say a super CME, capable of shorting out satellites around the globe and frying electric lines across a continent, might be a once-in-a-century event. In May 2012, a U.S. Geological Survey report estimated a 6 percent chance of another Carrington event occurring in the next decade. Still other researchers, such as NASA's Hathaway, point out that for an event that big, the statistics are too flimsy to measure. The uncertainty rests in the relatively brief span of time in which scientists have recorded a link between sunbursts and electromagnetic fluctuations on Earth, the first being Carrington's observations on Sept.

1, 1859. BY RICK MONTGOMERY THE KANSAS CITY STAR KANSAS CITY, Mo. When the sun got ornery in 1859, American telegraph operators saw sparks fly A huge solar flare belched a cloud of charged particles into Earth's path. But other than frying telegraph lines, the electromagnetic collision caused little stir in the world. Nobody back then had yet switched on a decent light bulb, much less charged an iPhone.

Yet the sun hasn't changed its ways, and that worries University of Kansas physicist Adrian Melott, among others. If the remnants of a similar solar flare struck the planet today? "Gee, I'd be without cable TV' Melott deadpanned. Without email too, some fear. No heating or cooling. No electric grid.

Satellite technology, it was nice knowing you. This is the scenario rolling out from a growing network of scientists, policymakers and survivalists. Not quite doomsday because life itself would continue, but a silent natural disaster that could unplug us from all we depend upon. "It's happened before, as recently as 1989," said astrophysicist David Hathaway of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "That geomagnetic storm took out a big transformer in New Jersey" Still, it was no "Carrington event," named for British astronomer Richard Carrington, who charted the 1859 solar burst.

Scientists today regard what happened in 1989 as a mere sun-to-Earth wakeup call, an electromagnetic puff, though strong enough to knock out power in Quebec and parts of the U.S. Northeast. Hathaway said the Big One, Carrington-style, "could be catastrophic," leaving much of North America without juice for months or years. And even then, the world knew about it only because an emerging technology went haywire. "Telegraph systems, the Internet of that age," said Daniel Baker, director of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

Sparks shocked telegraph operators and set fire to their paper Electric surges created enough juice in some telegraph lines that operators were able to communicate even after disconnecting their batteries. According to newspaper accounts, the Northern Lights could be viewed as far south as the Caribbean, the result of electrically charged particles from the sun entering Earth's atmosphere. But beyond the aurora sightings and the telegraph station fires, the CME of 1859 passed without much notice. "Without technology being our antenna to collect the effects of a geomagnetic storm, we'd have no way of knowing" if one ever arrived, Baker said. Nor could we know whether or not the Carrington event was as bad as sunstorms get.

Melott of KU, in a 2012 paper, proposed that material from a solar megaflare 10 times the strength of the Carrington kind bombarded this planet around the year 775. There just weren't wires to get blown out. There were cedar trees, however, that absorbed a heavy dose of something from outer space. Japanese scientists discovered a baffling spike in car-bon-14 deposits within tree rings dating to the eighth century In a study published in the journal Nature, they floated the possibility of a supernova causing the deposits because a burst so powerful from the sun had never been recorded. But Melott, along with Washburn University professor Brian Thomas and others, countered the Japanese findings with their own published study It challenged the notion that the Carrington event was the all-time mother of sun flares emanating to Earth.

Carrington "was a biggie," Melott said, but maybe not the biggest. Beware the "Charlemagne event," Melott's nod to the eighth-century warrior and king. In Washington, concerns about an epic sunstorm have not drawn a lot of public attention. But they are forging unusual political alliances. Policymakers on the right have long warned of terrorists detonating a nuclear device 20 miles above the United States, causing an "electromagnetic pulse," or EMP, that could wreak havoc on electric grids in ways a sun-spawned CME can.

In hopes of preventing both brands of chaos, tea party politicians have joined liberals such as U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif, to push legislation requiring utilities to harden the nation's electric infrastructure. Such a bill, called the GRID.