A solar physicist at NASA says there's no reason to think that strong solar flares expected in 2013 will disrupt life on earth, a day after a British official warned they could bring power and communications systems to a grinding halt.

"Solar flares happen all the time," NASA's Jeffrey Newmark said from Washington. "The key is, how do we mitigate?"

At a conference earlier this week, British Secretary of Defence Liam Fox caused a stir by warning that a once-in-a-century solar flare could bring modern life to a halt by paralyzing power grids and disabling satellite communications.

Fox said the British government has been working with experts and private companies to "build collective resilience" against the effects of a powerful solar flare.

"Much of our critical national infrastructure depends on data and services delivered from, or through satellites, whose sensitive electronics are vulnerable to some of the radiation emitted by the sun," Fox said.

NASA has predicted that a new wave of solar activity will likely peak around 2013. But the agency maintains that the stronger flares will be similar to those that earth has experienced as recently as 2002.

Newmark told Canada AM that the sun goes through 11-year cycles and solar flares are indeed expected to intensify over the next few years -- but they should be "business as usual."

The planet has experienced a solar cycle "maximum" before, he said Thursday morning, "and we understand what to expect from the future."

NASA has a fleet of spacecraft that monitor solar activity so that the agency can predict the sun's behaviour, Newmark said.

The space agency also has a warning system in place in the event of unusually powerful solar flares, he said, that could help safeguard power grids and satellites.

In 1859, a "super solar flare" knocked out telegraph lines around the world and lit paper on fire at telegraph offices. In today's high-tech world, a similar event could cause billions of dollars in damage, by some estimates.

Newmark acknowledged that our wired societies make them more vulnerable to solar events.

"However, at the same time the technology we use enables us to better understand these events, better predict them and enable us to mitigate them," he said.