(Illustration by Lisa Pringle)
This week, as spectacular auroras were visible across the country, I was curious to learn more about the geomagnetic storms that cause the phenomena we know as the northern lights. Normally, we take a question from readers for this column, but this week I simply had to ask, “What do we really know about the weather in space?”
Meteorologist Jonathan Belles: Well, it doesn’t rain or snow in space. So, when we talk about a storm in space, we’re talking about something different.
The sun is constantly emitting particles, whether it be light, the things we see outside, or electric particles that we can’t quite see in the same way.
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A storm in space is when you get an enormous burst of energy, called a coronal mass ejection, that will pop off of the sun and blast all the way past Pluto. That comes with a certain polarity, meaning it can interact with all sorts of things that run on electricity or radio waves.
It doesn’t cause a heat wave. The amount of heat that comes from the sun is relatively constant.
But you get a little burst in the upper atmosphere, but most of that gets held out by the Earth’s magnetic field while moving on to the rest of space.
I would imagine that there were people in Arctic communities near the poles as early as there were humans that were trying to figure out why there was some green and pink stuff in the sky. There might even be a Mayan tablet somewhere that says that solar storms are a thing.
Today, we know the auroras like we saw this week are caused by geomagnetic storms.
Our abilities to predict space weather haven’t caught up with meteorology on Earth, though.
Space weather is 50 to 60 years behind meteorological weather, just in terms of research and data. We’ve got at least three satellites up there now, at least from the U.S., anyway, that have been up there since 2017, pointing instruments at the sun to capture these sorts of storms.
These solar storms are important to identify because they can knock out our telecommunications systems.
There is certainly a chance, given how much technology we have these days, that someday – probably not today, tomorrow, or the next day, but probably in the next couple of 100 years – we’re gonna have a technological blackout caused by a solar storm.
When that day comes in the future, with all the technology that we have, it’s going to be very interesting to see how we respond to it as humans.
Do you have a question to ask the meteorologists at Weather.com? Write to us at morning.brief@weather.com and we’ll pick a new question each week from readers to answer.