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The solar storm knocked out GPS equipment on farms — and it could happen again

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The view from Tanner Borsa's farm near Yellow Creek, Sask., during last weekend's solar storms. While the skies were beautiful, Borsa, like many farmers, had trouble getting work done during the celestial event, which caused widespread outages and malfunctions on agricultural equipment.

Farmers across Canada and in some parts of the U.S. experienced GPS blackouts and malfunctions on their equipment during the weekend. With more solar storms on the horizon and an increasing reliance on GPS across different industries, experts say the problem isn’t going away any time soon.

"In agriculture right now, we're at the height of the planting season," he said. "And accuracy of signal is of extreme importance." Luke McCreary, a farmer near Bladworth, Sask., says his GPS equipment was off by nearly two metres during Friday night's solar storms, forcing him to manually compensate.

"It's essentially when the sun flings some of material towards Earth," said Nikhil Arora, an astrophysicist and postdoctoral researcher at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont.

 

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