Geomagnetic storm underway - Bright auroras sighted in Montana and Canada

Space Weather
Mon, 20 Apr 2020 13:08 UTC

© Philip Granrud

Taken on April 20, 2020 @ Kalispell, Montana, USA

Earth's magnetic field is reverberating from the unexpected impact of a CME during the early hours of April 20th. G1-class geomagnetic storms are now underway with bright auroras sighted earlier today in Montana and Canada.

"Northern lights danced across the entire northwestern Montana sky early this morning," reports Philip Granrud. "I photographed them with a wide angle lens on top of my car several miles outside of Kalispell."

"It was such a nice break from everything that's been going on in the world lately," he says.

This is the first geomagnetic storm of 2020. In fact, the last time storm levels reached G1 on NOAA Storm Scales was more than a year ago: March 16-17, 2019.

© John David McKinnon

Taken on April 20, 2020 @ Tthebacha (Fort Smith), Northwest Territories, Canada.

The cause of the storm appears to be a faint slow-moving CME (coronal mass ejection) that left the sun on April 15th, shown here in an animation from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO):

See here.

This CME was not squarely Earth-directed, and forecasters did not think it was likely to hit our planet. Nevertheless, it apparently did. Solar wind data suggest that the CME sideswiped Earth with a snowplow-like buildup of plasma shortly after 0130 UT on April 20th.