What impact, if any, does this have on ham radio, satellite, and other communications transmission /reception ?
Can be very disruptive. I noticed some satellite comms were flaky late yesterday.
Usually the radio propagation is blacked out with the protons that hit the ionishpere at the speed of light. The CME which comes a couple days later from a flare (speed may vary) gives us the geomagnetic storms and can cause issues with radio signals, but not like the speed of light protons days earlier. Hams can even bounce signals off auroras. I’m usually on VHF/UHF and haven’t fired up the HF in the last 12 hours. HF was fine then and I was listening to stations from thousands of miles away with little fading and normal background interference.
GEOMAGNETIC STORM UPDATE: A strong G3-class geomagnetic storm that sparked bright equinox auroras around the Arctic Circle last night is now subsiding. At the peak of the storm, Northern Lights descended into the USA as far south as Washington, Michigan, Montana, Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota. The activity was sparked by a stream of solar wind flowing from a large hole in the sun's atmosphere.
AN EXPLOSION OF PINK OVER ALASKA: Knowing that a solar wind stream was heading for Earth, forecasters predicted a geomagnetic storm last night. However, they didn't predict it would be so strong, a G3-class event. Marketa S. Murray photographed the pleasant surprise outside Fairbanks, Alaska:
"It was one of the best shows I've seen," says Murray, a longtime Alaska sky watcher and aurora tour guide. "The auroras were remarkable for their amazing pink and purple color."
The pink color is a sign of nitrogen. Most auroras are green--a verdant glow caused by energetic particles from space hitting oxygen atoms 100 km to 300 km above Earth's surface. Pink appears when energetic particles descend lower than usual, striking nitrogen molecules at the 100 km level and below. The solar wind stream currently blowing around Earth seems to be sending particles deep enough into Earth's atmosphere to spark this lovely type of aurora
Pictures at the link. Above.