JOPLIN, Mo. (KSNF) — If you missed the rare opportunity to see the northern lights Friday night (5/10), you may have one more opportunity to witness the phenomenon.
The northern lights, also known as the aurora borealis are likely to be visible in much of the United States again Sunday night (5/12) and possibly Monday, thanks to a severe geomagnetic storm.
According to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, geomagnetic storms occur when the sun sends charged particles and parts of its magnetic field to Earth, often through an explosive outburst of plasma from the sun, called coronal mass ejections (CME).
The Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) says this most recent geomagnetic storm — the strongest in more than 20 years — reached Earth Friday evening as an "extreme" G5 (geomagnetic storms are ranked from G1 to G5),
On Saturday (5/11), the extreme solar storm dropped to a lower intensity, but the storm activity may reach high levels again on Sunday. The SWPC has issued a Geomagnetic Storm Watch for May 12, which they say, "...could result in the northern lights visible over much of the northern half of the U.S., and maybe as far south as Alabama to northern California."
According to The Hill, your best bet to see the lights is between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. (provided there are clear skies or breaks in the cloud cover, and not too much light pollution from larger cities). If you look up and don’t see anything, people with newer cell phones might just be able to catch a view that’s better than what you can see with the human eye.
Americans in states as far south as Missouri, Arkansas, and even Florida were able to catch a glimpse of the northern lights Friday. Many people took to social media, posting photos that show the northern lights in shades of green and pink glowing in the night sky.
It's something many only get to see once in their lifetime, especially those in the Midwest — a location typically too far south of the polar region where the grand arc of blue, green, and pink in the night sky is a common sight.
