A solar storm is coming, polar auroras possible at low latitudes – Corriere.it

the arrival of a geomagnetic storm of solar origin is expected in the next few hours. This was announced by the NOAA space weather monitoring site. According to the Spaceweather.com website, it could generate at most a class G3 (strong) geomagnetic storm, with minor problems for the satellites, while on the ground, false alarms could be triggered at high latitudes in the electronic security systems. These conditions also occurred on February 27th.

The solar flare

The flow of charged particles originated from a strong medium-sized solar flare of category M1 which occurred on Friday at 20.12 (Italian time). The radio waves generated made it possible to calculate the speed of movement towards the Earth: about 580 kilometers per second, equal to over 2 million kilometers per hour.

polar auroras

What is very likely that you will be able to observe beautiful auroras: boreal in the north to latitude 50 degrees, and austral in the south. In Europe the latitude of 50 N is equivalent to that of Paris, Frankfurt and Prague, in the southern hemisphere to Tierra del Fuego in South America. The polar auroras are caused by the interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field of the flow of charged particles emitted by the Sun in cycles of maximum and minimum activity that last about 11 years. Now our star is climbing towards the maximum of the cycle, which will be reached in the second half of 2025. The spectacle of the polar auroras is due not only to their incessant movement in the sky but also to their colours. The green produced by the interaction of solar particles with atomic oxygen in the upper atmosphere about 100-160 kilometers high, the blue-violet color from nitrogen atoms about 90-100 kilometers above the surface. The red color appears only with very intense solar storms capable of exciting even molecular oxygen (O2) at altitudes around 24o kilometers which give the typical blood-red color to the night sky.