The night of Friday, May 10, running into Saturday, May 11, will be remembered by many in Metro Vancouver for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, many more will remember those dates as an opportunity missed, perhaps not to be repeated for generations.
According to some experts, the great solar storm of May 2024 is one for the record books. Anecdotally, it may be the greatest of solar storms of the past 500 or so years. I say “anecdotally” because the tools we have today for assessing such storms simply didn’t exist more than a generation or two ago.
We do know that the May 2024 storm produced auroral activity that was visible to the eye farther south (and also farther north in the southern hemisphere) than ever before recorded. That alone makes it impressive. Almost certainly many more people witnessed this auroral activity than did so for any previous solar storm. And the prevalence of mobile phones, with terrific night photography capabilities, meant those who missed the event became even more annoyed at the spectacle that was to be seen at even just a glance through images posted to social media platforms.
Here in Metro Vancouver we’ve had many false alarms for potential auroral activity, to the point where the general public had become somewhat jaded at news of possible northern lights. We are relatively far south and we don’t exactly have cooperative weather for these events.
However, on May 10 and into May 11, the many factors that go into a memorable auroral event came into perfect alignment. Almost completely clear skies, a relatively mild night, and a giant coronal mass ejection from an extremely active sunspot region which arrived as skies darkened across North America, all combined to produce a spectacle for the ages.
Around 10 p.m. here in Metro Vancouver cameras could pick up the first hints of what was to come. Wisps that looked like thin cloud bands. Some saw these with the naked eye and indeed thought they were just clouds and didn’t bother looking again. However by 11 p.m. it was apparent that this was to be a show of shows; colours began to appear, subtle greens, then purples and pinks. For me, that was the case from a sundeck with lots of nearby street lighting, as well as industrial lighting from business parks and shopping centres.
My son and I took the camera and tripod to a nearby dark park, just a hundred metres away, a small oasis where the city had forgotten to install lighting. One glance upward and we were captivated by the mesmerizing horizon-to-horizon sky of lights and dazzling shapes. It was as if the heavens had opened and someone was projecting a kaleidoscope of sorts earthward. Bands of colour, like green curtains, danced over the mountains. We were in awe.
All of my photography was with a standard DSLR camera mounted on a tripod. I used around 1600 ISO for the sensitivity, a wide-angle lens set to 14 mm, and varied shutter speeds from two to six seconds. I really didn’t bother looking through the viewfinder. I just pointed in random directions and shot away. I wanted to see the lights with my eyes and take in the experience rather than staring through the viewfinder of the camera.
I was somewhat taken aback that no one else was in the dark park to admire the natural spectacle. There were a few people on nearby streets looking up, itself an unusual occurrence in my experience.
At a coffee gathering following church on Sunday I brought along my laptop and photos. Of all the people I spoke with, only a handful had actually seen the geomagnetic storm’s impact on our skies. Two had taken photos. At another coffee gathering the following Tuesday, of some 14 people, I was the only one who had experienced the event. All had heard about it, and nearly all regretted missing it.
In person and through my social media feeds, I was asked repeatedly, “will I have another chance this week?” Here’s how I answered in my Twitter stream: “because of all the factors that come into play, regionally (i.e. here in Metro Vancouver), I’d say last Friday’s auroral event was a once-in-a-lifetime event, rather than a once in a generation (20 years) spectacle. I’ve been a northern lights aficionado since 1969.” Essentially I was alluding to the incredible energy of this geomagnetic storm, coupled with Vancouver’s notoriously fickle weather.
Will we see more auroral activity from Vancouver? Yes, I think we will. The current solar cycle may not yet have peaked. Even if it has, the down-cycle often produces big solar storms. Will we see spectacular aurora directly overhead again in this cycle? I’d be surprised to see anything remotely close to the Great May 2024 storm, and I think it will be more of a vague green glow near the horizon.
During the May 10-11 storm, there were reports of auroras seen as far south as Hawaii and Puerto Rico in the northern hemisphere and as far north as Namibia and New Caledonia in the southern hemisphere. On its Space Weather and Safety page, the U.S. National Weather Service describes the so-called Carrington Event, a geomagnetic storm in 1859 when aurorae were visible as far south as Cuba and Hawaii. “Today, a storm like that would cause significant impacts on our technology” notes the page. Well, they were seen that far south, even farther.
Your correspondent was part of an unusual American news conference early in the morning on May 10. The conference coincided with the issuing of a geomagnetic storm warning from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Space Weather Prediction Center, the first such warning since 2005. Essentially the news conference was to underscore that warnings had been issued to critical infrastructure operators (satellites, power grids, pipelines) about possible negative effects from such a high storm rating: level G4 or even G5 on a five-point scale.
During the news conference, experts generally allayed fears about an electrical grid collapse, noting that a lot of work had been done in recent decades to harden systems against the sorts of failures seen in previous solar cycles. As the storm ramped up that indeed proved to be the case. There were problems associated with GPS systems, not so much that they failed but their accuracy was diminished as the ionosphere expanded. Farming operations for instance were halted as GPS-driven planting could not proceed for a day or two.
I don’t expect to see anything quite like the Great May 2024 Geomagnetic Storm again in my lifetime, certainly not here in Metro Vancouver. However, I will still be looking skyward whenever there is a favourable space weather forecast for possible auroral activity.
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