According to the National Weather Service, rain is possible for the Bay Area on Saturday
On Thursday night, the aurora borealis lit up parts of the sky over Northern California. Viewers of KRON4 were able to take some amazing pictures of this natural light show.
Thursday, the Earth was hit by a series of unusually strong sun storms that made the sky look beautiful with pinks, purples, greens, and blues. The National Weather Service says that people as far south as the Central Coast could see the event.
“Again, it was a pretty big show,” said Shawn Dahl, a space weather forecaster at the Space Weather Prediction Centre of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He said that people as far south as New Mexico have told the centre that they have seen the northern lights.
He also said, “It’s been a great year.”
Even though NOAA sent out a serious geomagnetic storm alert earlier this week, there were no reports of power or communication problems right away.
Geomagnetic storms can make it more likely for auroras, or the northern lights, to happen and can also mess up power and radio messages.
It’s when the sun sends more than just heat and light to Earth. It sends the solar wind, which is made up of energy and charged particles. But that solar wind can turn into a storm sometimes.
Coronal mass ejections are bursts of energy that sometimes come out of the sun’s atmosphere. The NOAA says these cause solar storms, which are also called geomagnetic storms.
The NOAA says that there is another chance for higher-than-normal action on Friday. But once you get south of Canada and the northern Plains states, it’s not likely that you’ll see another one of nature’s light shows.
