The ‘extreme’ geomagnetic storm could bless us with more aurora displays tonight and tomorrow

The strongest geomagnetic storm in 20 years made the colorful northern lights, or aurora borealis, visible Friday night across the U.S., even in areas normally too far south to see them. And the show may not be over. Tonight may offer another chance to catch the aurora borealis if you have clear skies, according to NOAAand Sunday could bring even more displays reaching Alabama.

NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center said Saturday that the sun continues to produce powerful solar flares. This is on top observed earlier coronal mass ejections (CMEs) or explosions of magnetized plasma that won’t reach Earth until tomorrow. The agency has been monitoring a particularly active sunspot cluster since Wednesday and confirmed yesterday that it had observed G5 conditions — the level designated as “extreme” — which had not been seen since October 2003. In a press release Friday, Clinton Wallace, the director of the Prediction Center of NOAA’s Space Weather said the current storm was an “unusual and potentially historic event.”

Geomagnetic storms occur when flares from the sun interact with Earth’s magnetosphere. While this all sounds kind of scary, people on the ground really have nothing to worry about. Like NASA explained to X, “Harmful radiation from an eruption cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere” to affect us physically. However, these storms can mess up our technology and have been known to disrupt communications, GPS, satellite operations, and even the power grid.