Marylanders might have already missed their chance to see the northern lights during increased solar storm activity this weekend, according to a space weather expert.
Seeing the aurora in Maryland on Sunday night is “unlikely,” said Shawn Dahl, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, though he said there is a watch for a strong G4-level geomagnetic storm for the rest of the day and into Monday.
The northern lights, or aurora borealis, form when charged particles from these storms, also known as coronal mass ejections, come into contact with Earth’s upper atmosphere over the polar regions.
“After those collisions happen and things settle down, it emits light and this process continues,” Dahl said.
Geomagnetic storms are measured in strength on a scale from G1 through G5, he said.
There was a G4-level event early Sunday morning at 1:30 a.m. from a storm that came from the sun Thursday evening, according to Dahl. That storm is still passing over Earth, he said. But the power of the geomagnetic storm, like that of a rain storm, can fluctuate.
“The level can change during the course of a storm’s progression over Earth,” Dahl said. But the storm will weaken as it passes over the planet, eventually leaving it behind, he said. “We think it’s beginning to weaken now … but it still is possible we could see a G4 later this evening.”
Although Dahl said it was unlikely for Marylanders to catch the phenomenon with their naked eyes Sunday night, he couldn’t rule it out. The Space Weather Prediction Center is monitoring new, faint coronal mass ejections for potential arrival Monday night, but predicting the arrival time isn’t exact, he said.
“We’re trying to forecast something that left the sun 93 million miles away,” Dahl said. Predicting strength, arrival time and if the storms will even hit Earth is “very hard to figure that out when you only have a couple of spacecraft that are taking pictures of the sun, but we do our best,” he said.
Using this most recent storm as an example, Dahl said the Space Weather Prediction Center had initially predicted it would hit Earth in the late afternoon Sunday then adjusted the arrival time to Sunday at noon, but it actually arrived nine to 12 hours earlier, causing the visible aurora last night.
Sunday night in Maryland could be even more unlikely for onlookers to spot the aurora, Dahl said, depending on the strength of the coming ejections. Nighttime clouds Sunday might also complicate local viewing attempts.
Even if local stargazers don’t catch the aurora Sunday, they can look forward to seeing Mercury in the western sky June 20. Later, August will bring the Perseid meteor shower, though a bright waning gibbous moon might overshadow the show.
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