#geomagneticstorm

It’s the time of year for summer break, swimming, and oh, yes storms. June 1 marks the beginning of hurricane season on the Atlantic coast, but we’re not alone. Our neighboring planets have seen their fair share of volatile weather, too (like the Cassini spacecraft’s view of the unique six-sided jet stream at Saturn’s north pole known as “the hexagon”). 

This week, we present 10 of the solar system’s greatest storms.

1. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

With tumultuous winds peaking at 400 mph, the Great Red Spot has been swirling wildly over Jupiter’s skies for at least 150 years and possibly much longer. People saw a big spot on Jupiter as early as the 1600s when they started stargazing through telescopes, though it’s unclear whether they were looking at a different storm. Today, scientists know the Great Red Spot has been there for a while, but what causes its swirl of reddish hues remains to be discovered. More >

2. Jupiter’s Little Red Spot

Despite its unofficial name, the Little Red Spot is about as wide as Earth. The storm reached its current size when three smaller spots collided and merged in the year 2000. More >

3. Saturn’s Hexagon

The planet’s rings might get most of the glory, but another shape’s been competing for attention: the hexagon. This jet stream is home to a massive hurricane tightly centered on the north pole, with an eye about 50 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth. Numerous small vortices spin clockwise while the hexagon and hurricane spin counterclockwise. The biggest of these vortices, seen near the lower right corner of the hexagon and appearing whitish, spans about 2,200 miles, approximately twice the size of the largest hurricane on Earth. More>

4. Monster Storm on Saturn 

A tempest erupted in 2010, extending approximately 9,000 miles north-south large enough to eventually eat its own tail before petering out. The storm raged for 200 days, making it the longest-lasting, planet-encircling storm ever seen on Saturn. More >

5. Mars’ Dust Storm 

Better cover your eyes. Dust storms are a frequent guest on the Red Planet, but one dust storm in 2001 larger by far than any seen on Earth raised a cloud of dust that engulfed the entire planet for three months. As the Sun warmed the airborne dust, the upper atmospheric temperature rose by about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. More >

6. Neptune’s Great Dark Spot

Several large, dark spots on Neptune are similar to Jupiter’s hurricane-like storms. The largest spot, named the “Great Dark Spot” by its discoverers, contains a storm big enough for Earth to fit neatly inside. And, it looks to be an anticyclone similar to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. More >

7. Sun Twister 

Not to be confused with Earth’s tornadoes, a stalk-like prominence rose up above the Sun, then split into about four strands that twisted themselves into a knot and dispersed over a two-hour period. This close-up shows the effect is one of airy gracefulness. More >

8. Titan’s Arrow-shaped Storm 

The storm blew across the equatorial region of Titan, creating large effects in the form of dark and likely “wet” from liquid hydrocarbons areas on the surface of the moon. The part of the storm visible here measures 750 miles in length east-to-west. The wings of the storm that trail off to the northwest and southwest from the easternmost point of the storm are each 930 miles long. More >

9. Geomagnetic Storms

On March 9, 1989, a huge cloud of solar material exploded from the sun, twisting toward Earth. When this cloud of magnetized solar material called a coronal mass ejection reached our planet, it set off a chain of events in near-Earth space that ultimately knocked out an entire power grid area to the Canadian province Quebec for nine hours. More >

10. Super Typhoon Tip

Back on Earth, Typhoon Tip of 1979 remains the biggest storm to ever hit our planet, making landfall in Japan. The tropical cyclone saw sustained winds peak at 190 mph and the diameter of circulation spanned approximately 1,380 miles. Fortunately, we now have plans to better predict future storms on Earth. NASA recently launched a new fleet of hurricane-tracking satellites, known as the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), which will use the same GPS technology you and I use in our cars to measure wind speed and ultimately improve how to track and forecast hurricanes. More >

Discover more lists of 10 things to know about our solar system HERE.

The sky over Quebec was green. Silent. Almost peaceful. Nobody panicked. Nobody ran. People just stood there, looking up, the way you do when something is too beautiful to question.

Ninety-two seconds later, six million people lost power. The entire provincial grid collapsed before anyone understood what was happening. The lights that caused it were still dancing overhead.

March 13, 1989. The aurora borealis put on a spectacular display — and triggered a blackout across Quebec, according to the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. The beauty and the damage were not separate. They happened together.

What the Green Light Is Actually Telling You

An aurora begins at the sun. Not at the sky — at the sun. The solar surface periodically releases coronal mass ejections: billions of tons of magnetized plasma moving toward Earth at speeds between 500 and 3,000 kilometers per second. Earth's magnetic field deflects most of it. At the polar regions, where the field lines dip and funnel inward, some of that material gets through.

At altitudes between 100 and 300 kilometers, those particles collide with oxygen and nitrogen molecules. The collision transfers energy. The energy releases as light. Green aurora — the most common type — comes from atomic oxygen at roughly 100 kilometers altitude. The green light is not random. It is the visible result of particles colliding with the upper atmosphere.

Few understood they were watching a Kp 9 geomagnetic storm. It induced currents so powerful in the ground that nearby transformers simply failed. The 2013 Lloyd's of London risk analysis estimated that a comparable event striking today's infrastructure could cost between 600 billion and 2.6 trillion dollars in the United States alone. The green light is beautiful. Few people realize what it means.

The Cloud That Hit a Ceiling — and Kept Pushing

Most people see a storm cloud and think: rain. What they are actually looking at is a heat engine.

When surface air heats faster than the air above it, it rises. Moisture condenses as it climbs, releasing latent heat. That heat drives the column higher. The process feeds itself — harder, faster, until the rising air hits the tropopause, the hard boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere, sitting roughly 12 kilometers above sea level. There, it cannot climb any further. The air spreads outward and forms the flat anvil visible at the top of a mature cumulonimbus.

The NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory documented updraft velocities surpassing 175 kilometers per hour inside supercell thunderstorms between 2010 and 2022. Inside that column, ice particles collide and separate electrical charge across vertical distance. When the differential exceeds what air can insulate, it discharges. In milliseconds, a single lightning bolt heats the surrounding air to approximately 30,000 Kelvin — a temperature hotter than the sun's surface. The anvil top is the visible ceiling of that process. It is not just a storm cloud. It is a system turning heat into motion and electricity.

The Rainbow That Isn't One

Look at the arc in the photograph. Your instinct says rainbow. Your instinct is wrong.

What sits above that granite peak is a circumzenithal arc — produced not by raindrops but by hexagonal plate-shaped ice crystals suspended in high-altitude cirrus cloud. A standard rainbow requires liquid water and appears opposite the sun. This arc requires ice and appears in a different part of the sky, produced by refraction through the flat horizontal faces of crystals too small to see. The physics is identical. The source material is not.

The NOAA Atmospheric Optics program has documented over 40 distinct optical phenomena operating on these principles — halos, glories, coronae, arcs. Many of these pass unnoticed above populated areas every day. The circumzenithal arc only appears when the sun sits below 32 degrees above the horizon. Higher than that and the geometry no longer directs the refracted light toward any observer on the ground. These conditions happen more often than people realize. Most pass unnoticed.

Red Means Something Burned

The sky in this photograph is not on fire. But something was — and recently enough that the evidence is still crossing the horizon.

When the sun sits low, its light must travel through roughly 40 times more atmosphere than at midday, according to NOAA Earth System Research Laboratories calculations. That distance is not neutral. Atmospheric molecules scatter shorter wavelengths — blue, violet — outward in every direction. By the time the light reaches your eye, most of the blue has scattered away. What remains are the longer red and orange wavelengths.

After Krakatoa erupted in 1883, stratospheric sulfur dioxide particles enhanced this scattering, causing crimson sunsets to be documented in areas like Norway for months. The same effect occurs with wildfire smoke, with volcanic ash, with heavy industrial particulate. A deep red sky is not just a color. It is a record of what the air has been carrying for the past several hours. The signs are there almost every evening. Most people never notice them.

The Storm That Begins Rotating

There is a small house in the lower right corner of that photograph. It is still standing. For now.

What surrounds it is a supercell — not an ordinary severe thunderstorm, but a storm in which the entire updraft column has developed persistent, organized rotation. That rotation is driven by vertical wind shear: horizontal layers of air moving at different speeds, which tilt rotating air masses from horizontal to vertical as they are drawn upward. Each layered band visible in the image represents air at a different altitude being pulled into the system at a different velocity.

The NOAA Storm Prediction Center recorded 1,376 confirmed tornadoes in the United States in 2023 alone, the majority associated with supercell activity. The 2011 Joplin, Missouri tornado — produced by a supercell meteorologists had tracked for over an hour — killed 158 people and carved a damage path 35 kilometers long. Peak winds exceeded 320 kilometers per hour. The pressure change was powerful enough to damage structures beyond ordinary wind impact. Watching that formation from a distance raises a difficult question: how much of what you are seeing is information, and how much is just weather, indifferent to whether you understand it or not?

What the Sky Will Not Tell You on Its Own

Every phenomenon described here carries a limit worth stating plainly. The aurora does not always precede a blackout. A red sky does not always mean Krakatoa. A supercell does not always produce a tornado. The sky shows what is happening. Understanding it requires context.

The "red sky at morning, sailor's warning" maxim has genuine meteorological grounding. Low-pressure systems tend to move eastward, and a red morning sky suggests moisture-laden air approaching from the west. But it is a heuristic built for a specific geography and a specific century, and it fails outside those conditions. Modern numerical weather prediction — run by NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction using physics-based models updated continuously with real observational data — replaced that intuition not because it was useless, but because it was incomplete. The sky you see is the output of a system. The inputs are accessible only through instruments. Drawing confident conclusions from visual appearance alone, without the surrounding data, is a kind of confidence that atmospheric scientists have spent decades working to correct.

Knowing this does not make the sky less worth watching. It makes it worth watching more carefully.

Archive Notes

Why does the aurora sometimes appear red instead of green?

Color depends on which gas is excited and at what altitude. Oxygen above approximately 200 kilometers emits red light. Green aurora comes from oxygen between roughly 100 and 150 kilometers. During the extreme geomagnetic storm of May 2024, red auroras were visible as far south as northern Africa and parts of Mexico — latitudes where the phenomenon is almost never observed. During the Carrington Event of September 1859, red and white auroras were reported by observers in Cuba, Jamaica, and Hawaii, the most equatorial aurora sightings in the historical record.

What actually separates a supercell from any other severe thunderstorm?

A supercell is defined by persistent, organized rotation throughout its updraft column — a structure called a mesocyclone. Ordinary severe thunderstorms lack this deep rotational organization. The NOAA Storm Prediction Center classifies supercells separately because they produce a disproportionate share of large hail, damaging straight-line winds, and significant tornadoes relative to how frequently they occur. The Moore, Oklahoma tornado of May 20, 2013 — tracked for over an hour before it touched down — carried peak winds of approximately 340 kilometers per hour and killed 24 people.

Can a circumzenithal arc appear at any time of day?

No. The phenomenon requires the sun to sit below approximately 32 degrees above the horizon. Above that angle, the geometry of refraction through horizontal hexagonal ice crystals no longer directs light toward an observer on the ground. It also requires cirrus cloud containing the right crystal orientation — common but not guaranteed. These two constraints together mean circumzenithal arcs appear most often in morning and late afternoon, more frequently at higher latitudes where solar elevation stays lower for longer periods.

What You Now Know

The sky over Quebec was green and silent. It was also, at that exact moment, destroying the electrical infrastructure of a province. Beauty does not always arrive without consequences. More often than people realize, they arrive together — and the only difference between seeing and understanding is whether you know what you are looking at.

Tip For Readers

The NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center publishes real-time geomagnetic storm alerts and aurora visibility forecasts updated continuously. If you want to know when the sky is operating at its most consequential — before the lights go out — that is where to look.

Verified Sources

Source: thesun.co.uk

NASA has issued a significant warning about a major NASA solar storm heading toward Earth following a powerful solar flare released on May 14. The flare, classified as X2.7, one of the strongest on the solar flare scale, originated from the sun’s most active region, which is now rotating directly into Earth’s view. The flare has already disrupted radio communications across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East and caused some power issues in the eastern United States.

Solar flares are intense bursts of radiation from sunspots, which are darker, cooler regions on the sun’s surface. These bursts are known for releasing vast amounts of energy and have the potential to interfere with various technological systems on Earth. According to NASA, more flares from this active solar region could disrupt “radio communications, electric power grids, navigation signals,” and also pose risks to spacecraft and astronauts.

Space weather expert Vincent Ledvina commented on the situation via social media, noting, “This is getting intense,” especially as the active sunspot continues rotating toward Earth. While these events can pose serious risks, they also bring natural beauty. NASA confirmed that the northern lights, or auroras, will be visible across 11 U.S. states due to the NASA solar storm impact.

Northern Lights and Ongoing Solar Activity

As a side effect of this solar activity, vibrant auroras are expected to light up the skies across several U.S. states, including Alaska, Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Maine, as well as parts of New York. These northern lights are caused by interactions between solar particles and Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere, creating beautiful visual displays.

NASA emphasized that more solar flares are likely in the coming days. The UK’s Met Office also reported elevated solar activity, noting the presence of at least five sunspot regions currently visible from Earth. A particularly active magnetic region is emerging over the sun’s southeastern horizon, increasing the chances of additional moderate-class flares.

Although most activity remains at moderate levels for now, the growing number of sunspots suggests that stronger solar events are possible. This heightened solar activity is a reminder of how space weather , such as the ongoing NASA solar storm, can impact Earth, particularly as societies become more reliant on advanced technology and global communication networks.

Potential for Geomagnetic Storms and Historical Parallels

The solar storm risk includes the potential for geomagnetic storms, which occur when charged solar particles disturb Earth’s magnetic field. These can disrupt satellite operations, aviation systems, and even ground-based power grids. A historic example occurred in 1989 when a geomagnetic storm caused a nine-hour blackout across Quebec, Canada.

There is also speculation that the May 14 flare may have included a coronal mass ejection (CME), a massive release of solar plasma and magnetic fields that can intensify geomagnetic storms. However, scientists have yet to confirm this. Fortunately, the sun’s active region AR4087, responsible for the flare, is still near the sun’s edge and not fully facing Earth, offering a temporary reprieve from the worst-case scenario.