Northern lights forecasted to be visible into upper United States tonight | Hacker News Reader

Northern lights forecasted to be visible into upper United States tonight

swpc.noaa.gov

130 pointsdoubleg7228 comments

I'm in the air right now from Vancouver to SF and though the sky is dark since the cloud layer is blocking the city lights, I saw nothing over Washington at 25k feet and over Oregon at 33k feet. Kept eye out from 2030 to 2130 Pacific.

From https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast it looks like we took off too late for the high energy phase (happened around 15 UTC to 19 UTC, which is 8 Pacific to 11 Pacific when it was sunny). I would not have seen it.

The storm arrived early and already was dying down before nightfall in North America.

I expect more from NOAA getting "tonight's" and "tomorrow night's" more clearly communicated on their site using UTC. Not sure that site's graphic uses my browser locale.

If you click their link to the 30 minute forecast data, it has times in UTC there

I agree - I'm seeing a "creation time" which simply seems to be set to the current UTC time whenever I refresh it. This map seems to bear little resemblance to the 30-minute forecast for the current time, which shows very little activity.

The NOAA map is confusing, the webpage is titled "30 minute forecast" but it is not a forecast, nor is it 30 minutes. It shows 24 hours of history.

It's 24 hours of past 30 minute forecasts + one additional 30 miniute forcast (into "the future")

eg: Data collected at the L1 point at 2024-03-25 02:51 (UTC) is transmitted to earth, feed into the NOAA model which creates AT 2024-03-25 03:00 (UTC) (nine minutes after the L1 observations) a forecast for 2024-03-25 03:31 (UTC) (31 minutes after "present time" when model run using data observed nine minutes earlier)

Oh. I wish they had a "forecast vs. actual" for the past 24 hours.

This was my complaint as well. I have no idea what "tonight" and "tomorrow" mean in the context of those images. The creation times help me kind of understand but it'd have been way nicer if they'd have just said "The night of 03/25/2024" or something.

What is the best time in Seattle area to see aurora tonight? Any time after nightfall?

I suppose keep monitoring the 30 minute forecast page

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast

It doesn’t look good tonight - 30 min forecast is negative, and then cloud cover is forecasted around 1 am.

Ah ya, I've been refreshing the 30 minute forecast and playing back the last few hours. It doesn't seem to be progressing south towards Seattle at all unfortunately.

And I hadn't even thought about cloud coverage (ty!). Agree tonight's probably not the night.

Note that according to other comments here, that page shows a playback of the Past 24 hours and a single 30 prediction into the future.

From forecasts on that page and other forecasts, it won't go far enough south to be visible.

GOOD LORD! What is happening in there Seymour?

The Aurora Borealis? At this time of year? At this time of day? In this part of the country? Localized entirely within your kitchen?

Yes.

Can I see it?

No.

Seymour! The house is on fire!

Don’t worry mother, it's just the northern lights…

Please omit internet tropes: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Appreciate the effort to keep HN in a good place, but I'm not sure the rules above apply here. While related, tropes and memes are technically distinct concepts.

https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2020/01/meme-trope-notion...

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast

Why is the "Approximate Energy Deposition" (!= visibility?) on the side facing the sun much lower than on the side facing away from the sun? Shouldn't it be about the same?

It might have something to do with the shape of Earth's magnetic field lines and the way they extend away from the sun but are compressed toward the sun. Aurora, in turn, is caused by the spiraling of charged particles that are captured in these field lines and since the field is stronger on the dark side of earth it seems reasonable that you would see more particles on the dark side. We're casting a wider net there.

Too bad there is a full moon potentially drowning out the aurora...

Or in much of the upper Midwest… a blizzard.

Winter Storm. Blizzard has a specific meaning:

  In the United States, the National Weather Service defines a blizzard as a
  severe snow storm characterized by strong winds causing blowing snow that 
  results in low visibilities. The difference between a blizzard and a snowstorm 
  is the strength of the wind, not the amount of snow. To be a blizzard, a snow 
  storm must have sustained winds or frequent gusts that are greater than or 
  equal to 56 km/h (35 mph) with blowing or drifting snow which reduces 
  visibility to 400 m or 0.25 mi or less and must last for a prolonged period 
  of time—typically three hours or more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard

Not much to see here in western NY for me unfortunately..

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