Northern lights in the US: Solar storm hits Earth, producing colorful light shows across the Northern Hemisphere

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida. An unusually strong solar storm that hit Earth produced stunning displays of color in the skies of the Northern Hemisphere early Saturday, with no immediate reports of power and communications disruptions.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a rare severe geomagnetic storm warning when a solar flare reached Earth on Friday afternoon, hours ahead of schedule. The effects of the northern lights, which were on prominent display in Britain, would last all weekend and possibly into next week.

On Saturday morning, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center announced on Day the weather allows it.

Many in the UK shared phone photos of the lights on social media early Saturday, with the phenomenon seen as far away as south London and southern England.

There were sightings “up and down the country,” said Chris Snell, a meteorologist at the Met Office, Britain’s meteorological agency. He added that the office received photographs and information from other European locations, including Prague and Barcelona.

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NOAA alerted operators of power plants and spacecraft in orbit, as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to take precautions.

The storm could produce the northern lights as far south as Alabama and northern California, NOAA said. But it was difficult to predict and experts stressed that it would not be the dramatic curtains of color normally associated with the northern lights, but rather splashes of greenish hues.

“That’s really the gift of space weather: the aurora,” Steenburgh said. He and his colleagues said the best views of the aurora may come from phone cameras, which capture light better than the naked eye.

Take a photo of the sky and “there might be a nice little gift there for you,” said Mike Bettwy, head of operations at the prediction center.

This storm poses a risk to power grids’ high-voltage transmission lines, not power lines typically found in homes, Dahl told reporters. Satellites could also be affected, which in turn could disrupt navigation and communication services here on Earth.

An extreme geomagnetic storm in 2003, for example, knocked out power in Sweden and damaged power transformers in South Africa.

Even when the storm is over, signals between GPS satellites and ground-based receivers could be scrambled or lost, according to NOAA. But there are so many navigation satellites that any disruption should not last long, Steenburgh said.

The Sun has produced strong solar flares since Wednesday, causing at least seven plasma explosions. 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 appear to be associated with a sunspot that is 16 times the diameter of Earth, NOAA said. It’s all part of increased solar activity as the sun approaches the peak of its 11-year cycle.

NASA said the storm did not pose a serious threat to the seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The biggest concern is rising radiation levels and, according to Steenburgh, the crew could move to a better protected part of the station if necessary.

The increased radiation could also threaten some of NASA’s scientific satellites. The extremely sensitive instruments will be turned off, if necessary, to prevent damage, said Antti Pulkkinen, director of the space agency’s heliophysics science division.

Several spacecraft focused on the Sun are monitoring all the action.

“This is exactly the kind of thing we want to look at,” Pulkkinen said.