The storm - the largest in five years - will unleash a torrent of charged particles between 06:00 GMT and 10:00 GMT, US weather specialists say.
They say it was triggered by a pair of massive solar flares earlier this week.
It means there is a good chance of seeing the northern lights at higher latitudes, if the skies are clear.
The effects will be most intense in polar regions, and aircraft may be advised to change their routing's to avoid these areas.
In the UK, the best chance to see them will be on Thursday night, the British Geological Survey says.
The magnetic storm that is soon to develop probably will be in the moderate to strong level," said Joseph Kunches, a space weather scientist at the Space Weather Prediction Center, a division of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
He said solar storms this week could affect communications and global positioning system (GPS) satellites and might even produce an aurora visible as far south as Minnesota and Wisconsin.
An aurora, called aurora burials or the northern lights in northern latitudes, is a natural light display in the sky in the Arctic and Antarctic regions caused by the collision of energetic charged particles with atoms in the high altitude atmosphere.
Major disruptions from solar activity are rare but have had serious impacts in the past.
In 1989, a solar storm took down the power grid in Quebec, Canada, leaving about six million people without power for several hours.
YouTube:
The largest solar storm ever recorded was in 1859 when communications infrastructure was limited to telegraphs.
The 1859 solar storm hit telegraph offices around the world and caused a giant aurora visible as far south as the Caribbean Islands.
Some telegraph operators reported electric shocks. Papers caught fire. And many telegraph systems continued to send and receive signals even after operators disconnected batteries, NO AA said on its website.
A storm of similar magnitude today could cause up to $2 trillion in damage globally, according to a 2008 report by the National Research Council.
Update:
03-04-2012. With nearly 2.1 million sever request 'per-hour' to this website now, you most likely have heard about NASA warning the public, "to get ready for a once in a life time solar storm event". But since we first published this update back in early 2010, a lot more information has since unfolded. Soon we will add some additional NASA footage here that is very troubling, that gives cause to exactly why NASA is so concerned.
Additionally we have been inundated by email asking us about other pending issues expected in 2012-2013. IE: Meteorite storm, sudden pole shift, Nibiru (aka planet-x), extreme weather, earthquakes, volcanic activity and the oceans of the world sweeping across the continents of the world resulting from a sudden pole shift.
All we can say is that there is so much conflicting data out there, that it's hard to know what to believe. But no doubt that 2011 smashed all modern world records when it comes to the most natural disasters in a single year, breaking some three thousand records just in the United States. That alone says something. Should this trend escalate greatly 2012, mankind will have to start taking the 2012, 2013 warning signs very seriously.
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