Aurora at 40 degree latitude?

[Madison Gonzalez]

Do you think there will be aurora in places like the East Coast? Let me know in the comments!

[Vancanneyt Sander]

You are speaking about geographic latitude 40, but to know what activity you need to see aurora from your location you need to convert your geographic location to the magnetic location. This wil give you the real magnetic latitude from where you'll know if your in the high, middle or low latitude region. Please see our help section the low, middle and high latitude for more information. It also contains a city list with the magnetic latitudes for those locations and the required Kp.

[Madison Gonzalez]

I'm talking about cities like New York or Philadelphia, since I live about an 1 hour and a half away from Philadelphia, and I see the requirement for aurora down here is at around 7 or 8 on the Kp index. So, I wonder what kind of solar flare would be needed for aurora here and the percentage for that solar flare that happens and gives a Kp index of 7 or 8.

[Vancanneyt Sander]

There is no way you can see “this solar flare will result in Kp7”. Why? Because there are a lot of factors that have to be right before a Kp7 storm can even occur. For example a long duration M4 solar flare around center disk might deliver Kp7, a short duration X4 solar flare around center disk can’t deliver Kp7. Not with all solar flares is a coronal mass ejection associated with it, the chance for a CME is higher if the duration of the solar flare is longer. Next is that you can’t accurately predict the arrival of a CME, it’s impact time can be 6hours earlier or later than predicted, the later it arrives the more the chances for a solar storm decline. And when it does arrive, the IMF has to be strong southward directed for a prolonged period of time to get storm conditions and sometimes when a CME arrives, the IMF stays northward and prevents from a storm to be initiated.

I can only advise that you wait until nice solar flares happen and the predictions are out for what that event can produce and go with that 😉 

[Madison Gonzalez]

You're probably right. Some sort of big solar flare will hopefully happen sometime this year, and there will be many signs beforehand that will tell us that there is a big CME or solar flare coming.

[Vancanneyt Sander]

It all starts with sunspot regions that are capable of producing strong solar flares  (delta is the key) as we climb out of solar minimum the odds will rise and chances will come. We’ll alert when stuff happens and update on our news channels and on the forum so great times ahead 👍

To have an idea how many odds in a year, go to our solar cycle page where we have a graph of geomagnetic storms per year for the past +20 year. The graph can be filtered per storm level 😊