A powerful solar storm could disrupt power and communications, but also made the aurora borealis visible much farther south than usual. Pete Bouchard explains.
Friday has been a historic night for space weather.
We are in the midst of a G5 geomagnetic storm (the scale only goes to G5).
This is the biggest geomagnetic storm since 2003, and in some respects, may be even bigger.
Compounding this is that the active region of the Sun that produced this geomagnetic storm is also producing a significant solar flare that is hammering us with an intense blast of X-ray energy.
Both the geomagnetic storm and the X-ray blasts are likely to continue through the weekend as more waves of energy are en route from that specific sunspot.
While this seems like the peak tonight, we will remain in this heightened state until the sunspot rotates out of range of Earth early next week.
What this means is we are quite vulnerable to satellite and radio interference and/or blackouts. In the last event, without the solar flare aspect, we had power grids fail in Sweden and South Africa. In addition, GPS and cellphones may be affected. This is more of a gray area, so it’s difficult to predict exactly what that would look like.
The byproduct of all this is the amazing northern lights. We're seeing some spectacular photos across social media, and from our sister station, NBC Connecticut.
