Solar Storm Hits Earth, Producing Colorful Light Shows

An unusually strong solar storm hitting Earth produced stunning displays of color in the skies across the Northern Hemisphere early Saturday, with no immediate reports of disruptions to power and communications.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a rare severe geomagnetic storm warning when a solar outburst reached Earth on Friday afternoon, hours sooner than anticipated, The Associated Press reported. The effects of the Northern Lights, which were prominently on display in Britain, were due to last through the weekend and possibly into next week.
Many in the UK shared phone snaps of the lights on social media early Saturday, with the phenomenon seen as far south as London and southern England.
There were sightings “from top to tail across the country," said Chris Snell, a meteorologist at the Met Office, Britain’s weather agency. He added that the office received photos and information from other European locations including Prague and Barcelona.
NOAA alerted operators of power plants and spacecraft in orbit, as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to take precautions.
“For most people here on planet Earth, they won’t have to do anything,” said Rob Steenburgh, a scientist with NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.
The storm could produce northern lights as far south in the US as Alabama and Northern California, NOAA said. But it was hard to predict and experts stressed it would not be the dramatic curtains of color normally associated with the northern lights, but more like splashes of greenish hues.
“That’s really the gift from space weather: the aurora,” Steenburgh said. He and his colleagues said the best aurora views may come from phone cameras, which are better at capturing light than the naked eye.
Snap a picture of the sky and “there might be actually a nice little treat there for you,” said Mike Bettwy, operations chief for the prediction center.
The most intense solar storm in recorded history, in 1859, prompted auroras in central America and possibly even Hawaii. “We are not anticipating that” but it could come close, NOAA space weather forecaster Shawn Dahl said.
This storm poses a risk for high-voltage transmission lines for power grids, not the electrical lines ordinarily found in people’s homes, Dahl told reporters. Satellites also could be affected, which in turn could disrupt navigation and communication services here on Earth.
An extreme geomagnetic storm in 2003, for example, took out power in Sweden and damaged power transformers in South Africa.
Even when the storm is over, signals between GPS satellites and ground receivers could be scrambled or lost, according to NOAA. But there are so many navigation satellites that any outages should not last long, Steenburgh noted.
The sun has produced strong solar flares since Wednesday, resulting in at least seven outbursts of plasma. Each eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection, can contain billions of tons of plasma and magnetic field from the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona.
The flares seem to be associated with a sunspot that’s 16 times the diameter of Earth, NOAA said. It is all part of the solar activity ramping up as the sun approaches the peak of its 11-year cycle.
NASA said the storm posed no serious threat to the seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The biggest concern is the increased radiation levels, and the crew could move to a better shielded part of the station if necessary, according to Steenburgh.
Increased radiation also could threaten some of NASA’s science satellites. Extremely sensitive instruments will be turned off, if necessary, to avoid damage, said Antti Pulkkinen, director of the space agency’s heliophysics science division.
Several sun-focused spacecraft are monitoring all the action.
“This is exactly the kinds of things we want to observe,” Pulkkinen said.

Tests results released Friday showed the water quality in the River Seine was slightly below the standards needed to authorize swimming — just as the Paris Olympics start.

Heavy rain during the opening ceremony revived concerns over whether the long-polluted waterway will be clean enough to host swimming competitions, since water quality is deeply linked with the weather in the French capital.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo took a highly publicized dip last week in a bid to ease fears. The Seine will be used for marathon swimming and triathlon.

Daily water quality tests measure levels of fecal bacteria known as E. coli.

Tests by monitoring group Eau de Paris show that at the Bras Marie, E. coli levels were then above the safe limit of 900 colony-forming units per 100 milliliters determined by European rules on June 17, when the mayor took a dip.

The site reached a value of 985 on the day the mayor swam with Paris 2024 chief Tony Estanguet and the top government official for the Paris region, Marc Guillaume, joined her, along with swimmers from local swimming clubs.

At two other measuring points further downstream, the results were below the threshold.

The statement by Paris City Hall and the prefecture of the Paris region noted that water quality last week was in line with European rules six days out of seven on the site which is to host the Olympic swimming competitions.

It noted that "the flow of the Seine is highly unstable due to regular rainfall episodes and remains more than twice the usual flow in summer," explaining fluctuating test results.

Swimming in the Seine has been banned for over a century. Since 2015, organizers have invested $1.5 billion to prepare the Seine for the Olympics and to ensure Parisians have a cleaner river after the Games. The plan included constructing a giant underground water storage basin in central Paris, renovating sewer infrastructure, and upgrading wastewater treatment plants.

Solar Storm Hits Earth, Producing Colorful Light Shows