A severe geomagnetic storm may bring the northern lights, or aurora borealis, back to New York City on Wednesday night.
NASA said it had monitored a solar flare Tuesday and classified it as a G4. The highest level of geomagnetic storm is G5, extreme. A G4 storm is capable of creating an aurora visibility zone that stretches all the way to Northern California and Alabama.
The G4 solar flare was expected to hit Earth around midday Wednesday. Officials cautioned that it could cause disruptions to communication infrastructure like satellites, GPS systems and other technology, including, potentially, power grid stability. The storms cause the disruptions by interfering with Earth’s magnetic field.
It may also mean that the northern lights might be visible in and around the Big Apple.
NOAA/Space Weather Prediction Center
Amie Gallagher, the planetarium director at Raritan Valley Community College, showed CBS News New York a simulation.
“The sun is a mass of gas and it is boiling and rolling and sometimes magnetic field lines on the sun interrupt that boiling and it can cause tension and then there are these eruptions called coronal mass ejections,” Gallagher. “They were hitting the Earth kind of boom, boom. There were several of them and as those charged particles from the sun intersect with Earth’s magnetic field the charged particles spiral into our atmosphere, interact with the atmosphere, and then we get these dancing lights in the sky.”
Gallagher took her own photos Tuesday night while standing on her street.
“The pink and the green are oxygen interacting with those charged particles and lower you’ll get blues and purples and that’s nitrogen being excited by the charged particles,” Gallagher said.
CBS News New York
New York City obviously contends with a lot of light pollution, which may make for challenging conditions to see the northern lights. However the Big Apple, most of New Jersey and all of Connecticut are in the zone in which it is considered “possible” to see them this evening.
It’s more likely they’ll be visible across central and northern parts of New York, but those areas will be dealing with a bit of cloud cover, as well. Closer to home, there’s a chance you could catch a faint glow on the horizon across the Catskills, Hudson Valley, northern New Jersey, and Connecticut. South of the city, the odds are slimmer, but it’s worth a look if you’re out and about.
Gallagher said for a clearer glimpse, smartphone cameras may do the trick.
“The camera is a little bit more sensitive and its lens can be opened longer. That allows it to see things that are a little bit dimmer than your eyes can see,” Gallagher said.
For live maps, see NOAA’s aurora forecast model here.
In October of 2024, the northern lights dazzled New Yorkers, lighting up the skies over the city skyline with pink and purple.
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