A severe solar storm that struck Earth in November last year caused never-before-seen GPS disruptions that may have led to “significant losses” had they occurred during the American farming season, a new study warns.
Solar storms can bring dazzling auroras on Earth, which are mostly visible in the sky above the Earth’s North and South poles.
But sometimes, strong solar storms can trigger dynamic auroras, visible farther across the lower latitudes of northern Europe and America.
On 11 November, a massive solar flare ejected from an active sunspot region triggered such an aurora, seen as far south as central Florida in the US.
This led to turbulence in the Earth's electrically charged upper atmosphere layer, the ionosphere, spreading much farther than is seen during normal auroras.
Usually, disruptions in the ionosphere due to solar storms are strongest near the polar regions.
Scientists have now found that the November 2025 solar storm induced turbulence in the Earth’s ionosphere layer farther south than normal, and temporarily reduced the accuracy of GPS navigation systems by over 10m (33ft).
“This study established a connection between auroral brightness and its impacts on technological systems, revealing that horizontal positioning errors exceeding 10m occurred in mid-latitude regions, an area typically considered relatively calm,” researchers wrote in the study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
In the research, scientists combined aurora-camera observations with data from ground-based GPS receiver networks across the US and Canada.
They mapped electron density in the ionosphere, turbulence in this atmospheric layer, signal fluctuations, and GPS positioning errors during and after the solar storm.
Scientists found that the solar storm led to high-energy electrons travelling down Earth's magnetic field lines and colliding with gases in the upper atmosphere over a wide range of longitudes.
This, in turn, led to strong GPS signal-amplitude flickering across much of the continental US, the study found.
The research calls for communities at all latitudes to be more prepared for aurora-related GPS disruptions.
Scientists particularly call for attention to the key role played by GPS in autonomous transportation and precision agriculture in modern times.
GPS disruption caused by solar storms can have major consequences in these sectors, they warn.
"If the November superstorm onset had occurred during farming season in the American sector, it could have led to significant losses for the American farming and transportation industries,” researchers wrote.
“Hence, understanding the storm-time high- and mid-latitude irregularities requires knowledge of physical processes that control and describe the dynamics of auroral features, such as energy flux, expansion velocity, and precipitation scale sizes present in the auroral arc, all of which contribute to generating irregularities,” they wrote.
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