The skies were filled with the Northern Lights at Bogus Basin Ski Resort in Boise, Idaho, on Saturday.
Kyle Green/AP
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Kyle Green/AP
The skies were filled with the Northern Lights at Bogus Basin Ski Resort in Boise, Idaho, on Saturday.
Kyle Green/AP
A solar storm that pushes the northern lights farther than normal is expected to continue Sunday night and possibly into this week, but the impact won’t be as strong as in previous days, forecasters said.
Meanwhile, although the storm had an impact on power grids, telecommunications and global positioning systems, only minor damage was reported as the storm sent powerful electromagnetic pulses towards the Earth.
A series of powerful coronal mass ejections that arrived at Earth on Friday put on a dazzling show across the Northern Hemisphere on Friday and Saturday, bringing a dazzling show to places where they don’t usually see them, including China, Europe and parts of the United States.
Solar activity produces jets of high-energy particles that interact with gases in Earth’s atmosphere and produce the auroras that hover around the Earth’s poles. They are called the Northern Lights around the North Pole and the Aurora Australis around the South Pole.
Friday and Saturday’s storms expanded the Southern Lights’ viewing area to New Zealand, Australia, Chile and Argentina.
In the United States, viewings have been reported as far south as Alabama and Georgia and as far north as California. The Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) said powerful geomagnetic storms will become more intense on Sunday night and auroras will be visible again at lower latitudes.
The origin of solar storms is related to a group of sunspots on the surface of the sun. These blobs are filled with magnetic fields that act as slingshots, sending large amounts of charged particles towards Earth. These events, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), are more common during the peak of the Sun’s 11-year cycle in 2025.
These particles usually miss Earth, but now, NOAA says some of these jets are flying directly toward Earth.
The storm reached G5 (or “extreme”) levels on Friday and Saturday, causing bright green, pink and purple lights to be seen. Another particle burst is expected to reach Earth on Sunday, producing G4 (or “severe”) levels, and could reach G5 levels again early Monday.
While extreme storms create conditions for lights to expand away from the poles, these conditions can disrupt power grids and cause blackouts and degrade the performance of satellite communications and navigation systems.
A similar incident in 2003 caused blackouts in parts of Sweden and damaged power transformers in South Africa.
During the G5 storm on Friday and Saturday, SWPC received reports of power grid anomalies, high-frequency radio communication outages, degraded GPS performance and modified spacecraft operations, said Lt. Bryan Brasher, SWPC’s project manager.
Brasher said that while global power grids were under severe stress during the G5 storms, SWPC had not been notified of any damage.
“We have received reports of degraded radio communications from aerospace and maritime operators,” Brasher said in an email to NPR. “We have not received reports of disruptions in satellite communications.”
Brasher said the impact on GPS during the storm was noticeable.
“We’ve heard that there are problems with the use of precision GPS in agriculture across the Midwest, with both U.S. and European satellite navigation augmentation systems recording significant (but not necessarily impactful) changes in location accuracy,” he said.
SWPC Service Coordinator Shawn Dahl said it’s unlikely the storm will have the same impact in the coming days as it did on Friday and Saturday.
“Most of the material will probably pass in front of Earth, however, interplanetary space is still very disturbed, and even just the flanking edge of the latest CME could cause intensely harsh conditions,” he said.
NPR’s Amy Held, Geoff Brumfiel and Willem Marx contributed to this report.
