Will Miami See the Northern Lights Tonight or Tomorrow?

Earlier this week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a severe geomagnetic storm warning for a large swath of the United States. If that sounds familiar, it should — and shouldn’t.

It happened twice last year: in May and again in October, the NOAA correctly predicted storms would cross the threshold that separates G3 (Strong) from G4 (Severe) on its Space Weather Scale, which runs from G1 (Minor) to G5 (Extreme). Those instances were only two such occurrences since [looks at watch] 2005.

What Is “Space Weather”?

In the jargon of the NOAA’s Boulder, Colorado-based Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), “space weather” is geomagnetic activity on the sun in the form of so-called solar flares.

The NOAA introduced Space Weather Scales as a form of shorthand — akin to tornado, earthquake, and hurricane scales — to provide the general public with a heads-up regarding current and future space weather conditions and their possible effects on people and systems.

The scales inform us about three types of environmental disturbances: geomagnetic storms, solar radiation storms, and radio blackouts. They also indicate the frequency with which such events occur and provide a measure of the intensity of each event. As with the aforementioned analogous scales, they’re numbered to convey severity and list possible effects at each level, which can range from irregularities in the electrical grid and low-Earth-orbit satellites to GPS glitches.

And, oh, yeah: The northern lights (AKA the aurora borealis).

Aurora Borealis: What’s That Mean?

The term aurora borealis is derived from Latin and translates to northern dawn. So Earth’s inhabitants are actually treated to two types of aurora: Those of us who reside in the Northern Hemisphere may see aurora borealis, which emanates from the North Pole region, while Southern Hemisphere dwellers get the aurora australis, AKA — you guessed it — southern lights.

To drastically paraphrase the SWPC, when electrons collide with the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere, they speed up. Following our planet’s magnetic field to the polar regions, they collide with oxygen and nitrogen atoms and molecules, wreaking more atomic-level havoc. When they settle down again, they release their energy in the form of light — typically forming an oval-shaped aurora 80–500 kilometers above Earth’s surface.

Waxing toward the poetic, the SWPC notes that the auroral forms “consist of tall rays that look much like a curtain made of folds of cloth. During the evening, these rays can form arcs that stretch from horizon to horizon. Late in the evening, near midnight, the arcs often begin to twist and sway, just as if a wind were blowing on the curtains of light. At some point, the arcs may expand to fill the whole sky, moving rapidly and becoming very bright. This is the peak of what is called an auroral substorm.

“Then in the early morning the auroral forms can take on a more cloud-like appearance. These diffuse patches often blink on and off repeatedly for hours, then they disappear as the sun rises in the east.”

Why Do We Sometimes See Northern Lights in Florida?

If you want to see the northern lights in all their glory, you need to situate yourself somewhere close to the 60th Parallel — say, in Alaska — or even closer to the North Pole. Go there, and you’ll see the aurora more than half of the nights of any given year.

But when space weather activity increases in frequency and moves toward the upper reaches of the scale, the lights extend toward the equator, letting more of us in on the show. (Terrestrial weather permitting, of course. We all know clouds and rain tend to mess with one’s skyward gaze.)

Sometimes it feels like the SWPC ignores the existence of Florida — you know, the prominent (some might say phallic [🍆]) appendage that dangles from the eastern seaboard of the continental United States. Yet Floridians have reported catching glimpses of the aurora as far south as Miami and beyond.

That happened last spring and again last fall. And a perusal of X, the platform we still prefer to call Twitter, shows that last night’s stellar performance reached the central portions of the state.

But Miami — Isn’t That a Bit of a Stretch?

In response to a query from New Times, the SWPC’s Shawn Dahl offered insights into the phenomenon of ultralong-distance borealis love.

“People are seeing and capturing aurora images from much further south than the aurora might normally be visible because of changing understanding and also thanks to digital camera technology,” explains Dahl, who works as a space weather forecaster at the SWPC.

“Most people are noting a very nice red aurora in particular from areas well south of where the auroral perimeter might normally be expected because the red color is almost twice as high in the atmosphere as the normal green colors — this has to do with the particle interactions at those different altitudes.”

So there’s that, and also the intensity of this storm, which, as noted above, strayed into “Severe” territory, which the pros at the SWPC call G4.

As far as we’re concerned, things are looking up!