An immense blast of plasma spewing from the sun is to bombard Earth with the strongest radiation storm since 2005, prompting a rare warning from US weather officials and even a plan to redirect certain high-flying airplanes.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) issued a watch for a geomagnetic storm expected to reach our planet tomorrow after a satellite witnessed an ultraviolet flash from Sunday night’s massive solar eruption.

The storm poses no risk to Earth-dwellers, Doug Biesecker of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Centre told FOXNews.com.

But as a rare precaution, polar flights on Earth are expected to be re-routed, Kathy Sullivan, deputy administrator of NOAA, said today at a Meteorological Society meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, according to Space.com.

Eruptions on the sun shoot tremendous streams of charged particles away from the star – in this case directly towards us.

“There is little doubt that the cloud is heading in the general direction of Earth,” Spaceweather.com announced in an alert. “The blast from the immense solar radiation storm let loose with a so called coronal mass ejection (CME) that will hit the atmosphere Tuesday morning, something NASA and NOAA monitor for as it could cause problems for astronauts, communications satellites, and even rocket launches.”

It could also affect navigation and the power grid.

The solar flare that spat out on Sunday at 10.59pm local time was rated an M9-class eruption – nearly an X-class flare, the most powerful type of solar storm.

NOAA measures geomagnetic storms on a five-point scale from 1 to 5. G1 storms are minor, leading to weak power grid fluctuations and having only minor impact on satellites. G5 storms are extreme, leading to widespread voltage control problems, damage to transformers, radio outages and satellite problems.

Geomagnetic storms tomorrow may be as strong as G3, causing intermittent navigation issues and problems with low-Earth satellites.