In 2012, Whitley Strieber released an ebook titled Solar Flares: What You Need to Know, that explained the potentially disastrous effects on our civilization that a large-scale coronal mass ejection, or solar flare, could have. In 1859 a large flare resulted in the Earth being hit by a massive geomagnetic storm, dubbed the Carrington Event. The storm was strong enough to knock out telegraph systems in Europe and North America, and would have had far more dire repercussions if it were to occur today, in our more electronically-dependent civilization.
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Both NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center and the U.K. Met’s Space Weather Operations Centre have issued a G2-Moderate geomagnetic storm watch for April 2, due to the presence of a negative polarity coronal hole high speed stream (or CH HSS) facing the Earth. While this isn’t a full coronal mass ejection, coronal holes cause an increase in the speed and volume of the charged particles coming from the sun, and can affect Earth in similar, albeit more moderate, ways.
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