I live in Upstate NY, I can recall maybe once or twice in my entire lifetime hearing about being able to see the aurora and now it seems to be happening at least every few months, lately..
This seems like a significant increase over a very short period of time.. why is this happening?
In: Planetary Science
The sun goes through cycles of activity – what you might hear being called “solar minima” and “solar maxima” – where the frequency of sunspots, solar flares, prominences, and coronal mass ejections increase. This happens about every eleven years. I’m not sure why this peak is so much more energetic than the ones in 2012-2013.
Edit: As some other commenters below have mentioned, the timing of the sun’s CMEs matter a lot more than the intensity, because the earth still has to intersect with the path of the ‘plasma burp’ for us to get an aurora event like this.
Aurorae are caused by the solar wind — charged particles that are constantly emitted from the sun — slamming into the Earth’s magnetic field and being funnelled towards its magnetic poles. They interact with the atmosphere, causing aurorae in a big circle around the poles. The solar wind runs on a cycle with a period of roughly eleven years. Right now, we’re at “solar maximum”, so the peak of the cycle, and it’s a particularly, unexpectedly, strong one.
The result is that there are more aurorae. Since the magnetic north is tilted down towards North America from true north, the aurorea extend significantly further south through Canada and into the States than in Europe, where they skew much further north. As a consequence, you’ve always been more likely to see aurorae from New York State than an equal latitude in Europe — and since we’re at a particularly strong solar maximum, you’re more likely to see them now than in decades. Depending on how old you are, more than in your life.
The other thing that’s happening is that this is the first large solar maximum since social media really got big, so we see vastly more photos of it, and read vastly more posts about it, and since the media drives so many stories by scraping Twitter and Reddit for stories, the media is able to report more about the aurorae than it has at previous maxima.
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Thanks to a world awash in mobile phones with high-quality cameras, and ways to share these photos instantly on social media, we’re more likely to see and hear about these auroral displays than ever before. We’re also at the peak of solar maximum – when the sun is moist active and likely to produce aurora.
In other words, they’ve always happened (and peak around every 11 years or so) but we just haven been able to image/share them as readily as the past leading to increased coverage.
You are probably familiar with terms like El Nino and La Nina. Those are Earth-weather cycles that drive periods of more or less precipitation, adjusts the jet stream, impacts ocean temps and cyclone/hurricane cycles, etc. from year to year.
El Nino and La Nina cycle in sequences over something like 5 to 7 years.
The sun also has long-term weather cycles (for lack of a better word). The cycle relevant to your question works in cycles of 10-12 years, with 11 years being the most common/cited.
In quiet parts of the cycle there are few sunspots and very little outburst from the sun, in the busy part of the cycle there are loads of sunspots and flares. The sunspots/flares part of the cycle are what cause interaction with the Earth’s magnetosphere, and aurora are one of the consequences of those Sun-Earth interactions.
This particular cycle is *very* active compared to the last few, and we have a news environment that is interested in the topic and phone/camera tech is developed to a point where random people can capture an image of even a low-grade light show even if not something like you see in National Geographic; phones were not quite there yet that last active phase *and* the last active phase was not nearly as active as the current one.
Taken together, we have a phase that is more active than the last few cycles, a news environment more interested in the topic, and technology that allows an average person to participate in an active way (whereas before we were only passive observers).
Edit: the sun is forecast to be in its current active phase through mid-2025 or perhaps early 2026 depending; it should then start sloping off to a quiet phase, with the quietest stage of the cycle being in roughly 2029-2031 and then things will start picking up leading to the next “peak activity” phase sometime in the mid/late 2030s.
edit: it’s interesting to look back through history and track phases, there are some half-decent records going back to about the 1600s and occasionally oral or written stories/records dating back hundreds or sometimes thousands of years; though obviously the older they are the more abstract and mystical the accounts tend to be since the authors were less likely to know what was going on but they still wanted to record that *something* was happening. Whatsmore, scientists are starting to figure out ways to track particularly active cycles back through time based on unstable isotopes trapped in ocean sediments, tree rings, etc. and tracking changes in those isotope ratios from one ring or layer to the next.
Here is one from an ancient Chinese astronomical observation: [Evidence of Earliest Aurora Found in Ancient Chinese Texts | Smithsonian (smithsonianmag.com)](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/evidence-of-earliest-candidate-aurora-found-in-ancient-chinese-texts-180979979/#:~:text=Scientists%20found%20evidence%20for%20the,is%20unknown%20the%20Independent%20reports.)
And here is a 15 minute video about how scientists are starting to untangle major events in the geological record: [https://youtu.be/MbcUEyQ1fEo?si=vgTahHnljQnpAWV4](https://youtu.be/MbcUEyQ1fEo?si=vgTahHnljQnpAWV4)
edit 2: the Chinese record is mentioned in that article along with several others, but the article doesn’t go into much depth. The researchers wrote their conclusions in a paper you may find more interesting, here: [A candidate auroral report in the Bamboo Annals, indicating a possible extreme space weather event in the early 10th century BCE – ScienceDirect](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0273117722000229)
People who haven’t actually seen them don’t realize that modern digital cameras on smartphones can pick up the aurora and enhance it to far more brighter colours than it actually is in reality – what my camera saw is not what I saw. Otherwise, we’re at a very strong peak of the cycle, enjoy the show!
Also todays technology lets us see/sense the solar flares and strength etc (I honestly don’t know what they measure).
[This report](https://mathewjowens.github.io/publications/papers_files/MNRAS_Lockwood_aurora%206.pdf) is interesting and shows the May event as being the 3rd largest in recorded history. The one last week was similar but they haven’t crunched the numbers yet on it. This is partly about the availability of smart phones with night modes and social media to make it viral, but mainly it’s just an absolutely exceptional year.
My wife sent me a photo of the Northern Lights the other day from our place east of Edmonton, Alberta. The thing is, she was facing south. I have been living in western Canada since the 80’s and have never seen the Aurora Borealis to our south. A lot of strange things going on in our environment these days.
There was a large solar storm a few days ago. The charged particles launched by the sun are just how hitting Earth.
We are leaving a solar maximum right now, part of an 11 year cycle where the sun goes through an increased period of activity
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