An unusually strong solar storm headed toward Earth could produce northern lights in the U.S. and potentially disrupt communications this weekend.

An unusually strong solar storm headed toward Earth could produce northern lights in the U.S. and potentially disrupt communications this weekend.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a rare geomagnetic storm watch — the first in nearly 20 years. The watch starts Friday and lasts all weekend.

NOAA is calling this an unusual event, pointing out that the flares seem to be associated with a sunspot that’s 16 times the diameter of Earth. An extreme geomagnetic storm in 2003 took out power in Sweden and damaged power transformers in South Africa.

The latest storm could produce northern lights as far south in the U.S. as Alabama and Northern California, according to NOAA.

  • LostXOR@fedia.io
    12·
    6 months ago

    NOAA’s predicting a Kp index of 8.33, hopefully we’ll get some good auroras tonight!

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldMEnglish
      9·
      6 months ago

      There was a map of my state showing where the aurora would likely be visible.

      The area stopped at the county immediately north of mine.

      Sigh.

      • LostXOR@fedia.io
        8·
        6 months ago

        Go out anyways and look north, there’s a good chance you’ll see something.

        • girlfreddy@lemmy.caOPEnglish
          4·
          6 months ago

          I remember watching the aurora from the Bastille Day solar storm in 2000. The whole sky in NorthWestern Ontario was red … like a red umbrella shimmering down. I’ve never seen an aurora like it since.

        • CorkyskogEnglish
          3·
          6 months ago

          I assume there is like no cloud penetrative? We have light clouds and fog all week and that sucks.

          • LostXOR@fedia.io
            2·
            6 months ago

            Yeah they can’t really be seen through clouds aside from maybe the clouds looking slightly brighter.

    • A_A@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      6 months ago

      The K-index quantifies disturbances in the horizontal component of Earth’s magnetic field with an integer in the range 0–9 (…)
      The official planetary Kp-index is derived by calculating a weighted average of K-indices from a network of 13 geomagnetic observatories (…)
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-index