Comment A brilliant aurora display could grace the northern skies from Wednesday to Friday after the sun fired several waves of energy towards Earth earlier this week. Activity is expected to peak Thursday through Friday as a powerful geomagnetic storm, rated G3, is expected to reach Earth. A strong G3 storm “brings the Northern Lights to the United States,” said Bill Murtagh, program coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (NOAA’s SWPC). He said sky watchers could see the dancing light from New England to the Great Lakes to northwestern Oregon and Washington state. That is if clouds aren’t a problem. On Wednesday, sky watchers in the Upper Midwest and New England may see too much cloud cover to get a good look at the aurora. On Thursday, when the geomagnetic storm is expected to be at its strongest, scattered cloud cover still appears possible in parts of the northern tier of the country, although much of Montana, Michigan, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island is all predicted to have mostly clear skies. AURORA FORECAST: Tonight’s aurora forecast for the possibly impending moderate/severe geomagnetic storm shows generally cloudy conditions in the Northeast and better than average conditions for parts of Michigan, the Rocky Mountain West, the Pacific Northwest. Details below: pic.twitter.com/OebQXDr1oU — Space Weather Watch (@spacewxwatch) August 17, 2022 Auroras are created when the sun sends a burst of energy and particles toward Earth through solar flares, coronal mass ejections, or active solar wind streams. Some of the solar particles collide with Earth’s magnetosphere and travel down the magnetic field lines into Earth’s upper atmosphere, where they can excite nitrogen and oxygen molecules and release photons of light – known as the aurora borealis. In this case, several coronal mass ejections (CMEs), or large ejections of plasma and magnetic material from the sun, have been generated in a particularly active region on the sun in recent days. Coronal mass ejections come just below a huge coronal hole that spans the sun’s northern and southern hemispheres. A coronal hole spews out a fast solar wind full of particles that alone can cause some minor geomagnetic disturbances on Earth. Much of the solar energy is aimed at Earth and is expected to cause moderate to strong geomagnetic storms. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center has issued geomagnetic storm watches for Earth from Wednesday through Friday. “There is a lot of excitement from solar physicists and space weather people, but there is no concern. There’s nothing to worry about, there’s no imminent danger,” said Alex Young, associate director for science in the Heliophysical Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He added that late last night the first CME had only minor effects on Earth. Some solar flares have already caused minor radio outages in recent days. Larger solar storms can also disrupt GPS systems. On Thursday, when the geomagnetic storm is expected to be strongest on Earth, the enhanced activity will be attributed to a “cannibal CME” event, which is when a faster-moving CME swallows a slower one. Coronal mass ejections can travel anywhere from 1 million miles per hour to 6 million mpg as they travel through space, meaning a faster-moving CME can easily overtake a slower one before reaching Earth. “When the slowest [CMEs] they launch first and the faster ones catch up, they can be even more impactful,” space weather physicist Tamitha Skov explained in a live YouTube broadcast, adding that the term isn’t her favorite way to explain the phenomenon, however. “Cannibalism is not really real, [CMEs] don’t really eat each other,” Skov said. “All they can do is plow into each other like bumper cars and hit each other’s rears and size each other up.” More solar storms are expected as the sun continues its 11-year cycle of solar activity, which ramps up toward maximum, which Murtagh expects to reach sometime between 2024 and 2025. “Since we started moving up from solar minimum, we’ve had some G3-level storms, but we haven’t had any bigger than that yet. We have yet to have a G4 or higher geomagnetic storm at this stage of the cycle,” Murtaugh said. “But this is inevitable. We will see this level of storminess in the coming months and years.” Geomagnetic storms are categorized using NOAA’s G-Scale, a tool that ranges from G1, a minor solar disturbance, to G5, an extreme storm capable of causing widespread power outages, knocking out satellites for days and making the northern lights visible as far south as Texas. and Florida. Some parts of the Earth appear more at risk from solar weather than others. A combination of local geology, proximity to the ocean, latitude and large interconnected power grids all play into calculating which areas are at the highest risk of outages caused by geomagnetic storms, according to Murtagh. “One of the most vulnerable areas essentially in the world is the Northeast Corridor of the United States,” Murtagh said, adding that parts of Canada are also quite vulnerable to solar storms. The last G5 storm to hit Earth hit in 2003, with a series of coronal mass ejections that hit around Halloween. The storm knocked out satellite systems, knocked out power in parts of Sweden for an hour and sent the northern lights as far south as Florida, according to NASA. Another disruptive solar storm struck in March 1989, causing significant damage to global communications networks and knocking out power to much of Quebec for 12 hours. “Just like people who live in areas where there are hurricanes or tornadoes, it’s always good to have flashlights, to have extra batteries, to put some water aside because it’s true that recent research work has shown that the geology is such that it [the Northeast] slightly more prone,” Young said. Kasha Patel contributed to this report.
