A severe geomagnetic storm offered Box Butte County residents a glimpse of the Northern Lights over the weekend.
The NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center issued a G4 Watch, the first of this severity since January 2005, from Friday into Saturday, tracking a series of coronal mass ejections, eruptions of solar material, heading toward Earth. The SWPC provided an update, noting that G5 (extreme) conditions were observed, leading the aurora to be visible across a majority of the United States.
The SWPC noted possible impacts to communications, GPS and other technologies. They noted that the last time G5 conditions occurred were in October 2003, which, in Sweden, led to power outages, and, in South Africa, damaged transformers. A complex sunspot, 17 times the diameter of Earth, was determined to be the cause.