The solar flare activity of October-November 2003 reached historic intensity levels and produced several large Earth-directed CME’s that had the potential to cause historically large geomagnetic storms as well. These CME’s did cause various geomagnetic storm indices, particularly the regional K and Planetary Kp index to reach maximum levels for many hours. However, the resulting geomagnetic storms, while causing isolated and important disruptions to power grids, were not of historically large size when considering the rate-of-change of regional geomagnetic fields in many locations. Impacts to power grids are caused by large dB/dt variations in regional geomagnetic fields, in most cases the peak geomagnetic disturbance intensities (in nT/min) were only a fraction of what has occurred during historically large geomagnetic storm events.

A review will be provided of the CME passages and features of the passage that drove resulting geomagnetic storm events and impacts to electric power grid infrastructures on October 29-30, 2003. A brief overview of the geomagnetic storm disturbance morphologies and intensities relative to other noteworthy storms will also be provided.