The dazzling phenomenon could be visible on Saturday night or early Sunday morning, experts said, depending on the weather and local light pollution.
Magnetic energy had been building up in the sun this week like a rubber band twisted into a corkscrew. On Thursday morning, the rubber band snapped, and the pent-up energy was released as a solar flare, ejecting about a billion tons of plasma gas that could result in the dazzling display known as the northern lights once it reaches Earth this weekend. But will it even be visible on Saturday night or early Sunday morning? “If I was in the northern tier of the United States, then I would take a look in the sky,” Howard J. Singer, chief scientist at the Space Weather Prediction Center at the National Weather Service, said in an interview on Saturday. The prediction center issued a geomagnetic storm watch on Friday that said the storm may drive the aurora borealis, the scientific name for the northern lights, over Washington State, the upper Midwest and the Northeast on Saturday. The storm was classified as a G3 on a scale from G1 to G5. It is not expected to cause technology disruptions, the center said. “Typically when we get to that level, we will see northern lights in the northern tier states,” William Murtagh, the Space Weather Prediction Center’s program coordinator, said in an interview. But there are unknowns associated with any magnetic storm, especially the exact timing of its arrival.
