Multiple outbursts from the sun could trigger magnificent northern lights this weekend.
By Kasha Patel, The Washington PostThis image from NASA’s solar dynamics observatory on Saturday, March 23, 2024 shows a geomagnetic storm from a solar flare from the Sun.
Current forecasts project the lights could be seen as far south as Alabama and California, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s. Chances of seeing the lights will be highest in the northern United States, Canada and northern Europe. “It is a rather volatile situation on the sun right now that we’re monitoring very closely,” said Bill Murtagh, program coordinator at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. “We’re going to get somewhat of a prolonged period of geomagnetic storming.”
“Depending on how these are staggered, you can expect the activity to last longer,” said Rob Steenburgh, a space scientist at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. “Our expectation and the modeling do suggest that they kind of catch up with each other.The northern lights are seen over a farm near Pulaski, Wis., on Sunday, April 23, 2023. An intense solar storm could have the aurora borealis gracing the skies farther south than usual.
The coronal mass ejections came from a particularly bustling area in the southwestern hemisphere of the sun, labeled active region 3664, Steenburgh said. Active regions are easy to see because they contain dark areas called sunspots. Sunspots are temporary dark blotches where the sun’s magnetic field is extremely strong, eventually breaking through the sun’s surface.
The size of the sunspot group is actually on par with that of the 1859 Carrington event, dubbed one of the most intense solar storms to hit Earth, but Murtagh said this incoming geomagnetic storm will not be close to the same level of the Carrington storm.
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