SPOKANE, Wash. — Get ready for a chance to see the northern lights on Thursday night in what could be a display that rivals what we saw back in May!
Aurora forecasting can be very challenging, but the first piece of the puzzle has been revealed to us. A solar storm on the surface of the Sun just erupted an Earth-facing Class X9.0 solar flare, the most powerful on record since 2017. This is just the latest coronal mass ejection (CME) in what has been an incredibly active solar cycle. In fact, the same region of the sun just produced a Class X7.1 solar flare just two days prior.
NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, which monitors solar flares and predicts the strength of solar storms and aurora on Earth, was already warning for an aurora potential for Thursday and Friday nights. This latest flare, rated R3 (Strong) will likely keep the aurora likeness high for the next one to three days.
Should the KP-Index, which quantifies solar storms on a scale from 1-9, reach a seven as predicted, the northern lights should be well visible across the entirety of the northern U.S., with a potential for it to be overhead for those closest to the Canadian border. Any stronger and we're looking at an event that could rival that which we experienced back on May 10th.
On that mid-May day, the KP-Index reached a maximum of nine, and the results were nothing short of magical! The aurora on that day was straight overhead for Washington and Idaho, and locations in the southern U.S., like Arizona, could even see the aurora clearly on the northern horizon.
As always, find a dark spot away from city lights to have the best chance to see the lights, and keep your fingers crossed... and bundle up... temperatures will be in the 40s and 30s tonight. Good luck and happy viewing!
