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Solar Storms Could Bring Northern Lights South
RedEaredSlider writes "Increased solar activity could give residents of the continental US, southern Europe and Japan the chance to see the northern lights for the first time in several years. The National Weather Service's Space Weather Prediction Center says the sun is entering a period of high activity, marked by more sunspots and a greater chance of a coronal mass ejection, or CME, hitting the Earth. That would result in auroras being visible much further from the poles than they usually are."
Start madly flailing our arms in a haphazard way above our heads, screaming about how a CME will cause worldwide power outages, cause the end of civilization and generally revert us to either man eating cannibals, savages with funny tattoos and a general like of badly built all terrain vehicles slapped together out of junk or living under a sheet of ice a mile thick after increased solar activity somehow triggers a massive chain reaction that activates new types of particles in the earth's core and causes massive volcanic activity thus blocking out the sun?
*flails arms madly above head while running in small circles*
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
The key word there in that article is *could* give residents the chance to see the aurora. If you look at the chart on the Solar Cycle Progression and Prediction webpage (http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/) then you'll notice that the predicted sunspot activity and the actual activity are still very far apart. Additionally, the predicted maximum sunspot number is going to be well below the past two cycles (1991 hitting a sunspot number of 147, and 200/2001 hitting a high of 120. For this cycle, they're predicting a high of only 90 for the sunspot number, a level that hasn't been that low since the 1880's.
So while it is possible that folks south of 45 degrees latitude might see the aurora, it'll have to be courtesy of a really strong CME (coronal mass ejection) aimed in our general direction. Otherwise, it'll probably be a rather boring solar cycle 24.
Having lived in interior Alaska my entire life, I can say that the northern lights are one of the least interesting large scale natural events out there. Compared to something like a nice sunset, torrential rain, or even a clear starry night, it's really not exciting. The photographs you can find about them are usually rather long exposure times, and even on the "best" nights what you see with your naked eye is no more than a green haze.
Then again, fireworks or flashing lights don't excite me either. Maybe it just takes a certain type of person to like that kind of thing.
In the Northern hemisphere it's Aurora Borealis. In the Southern hemisphere it's Aurora Australis. What's it called when it hits the lower latitudes closer to the Equator?
An acid trip.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Couldn't this be posted every 11 years as the solar cycle ramps up towards its peak?
Note that the auroras are aligned to the magnetic poles, so you can't just use latitude. As a result, people in places like Ohio are more likely to see them than people in Oregon. Here's a web page with the current conditions: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/pmap/index.html
This article is just so much fluff and nonsense wrapped around a little factual info. I've been in the business of space weather since the early 1970s, and this kind of sky-is-falling stuff flares up towards the front end of each solar cycle and then dies off as the sky remains stubbornly in place. Yes, we're headed into a time of increased activity, but so slowly that we may be in for a real "dud" solar cycle. Unless things start picking up soon, we may be lucky to see aurora as far south as Oregon. That said, everything could change completely in a few months. The point is that the kind of prediction made in TFA is impossible to make at this point in the cycle, and to make a big deal out of a completely unfounded prediction is both bad science and very unprofessional. This is not the fault of the poor fellow mentioned in TFA (Joe Kunches, whom I know), but of the flack who wrote this thing.
(*) The Australian Tourist Board is currently funding feasibility studies in order to increase the number of visitors to the southern (soon to be renamed "northern") hemisphere.