According to experts, there is “a good chance” that you can see the Northern Lights in Flanders this weekend. Since Wednesday morning, the sun has fired at least ten solar flares, which could lead to the beautiful natural phenomenon on Earth. The conditions seem ideal next night and in the night from Saturday to Sunday. “Everyone in our community already has goosebumps,” laughs aurora expert Bart Medaer.
It is a group of enormous sunspots with the size of sixteen times our Earth that blew the solar flares towards the Earth. According to the Dutch meteorologist Wouter van Bernebeek, almost every one of them caused a solar storm. When the giant clouds of electrically charged particles (CMEs) reach Earth and come into contact with the molecules in our atmosphere, they produce aurora. Along the way they can overtake and strengthen each other – a ‘Cannibal CME’ – and that appears to have happened now.
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“A Kp8 is expected,” says Bart Medaer, who has been traveling to the far north for years to see the aurora and monitors the solar parameters via a special app. “The higher the Kp index (the global geomagnetic activity index, ed.), the greater the chance that the aurora will be visible further south. At Kp6 you can see the northern lights in the north of the Netherlands, at Kp7 also in the south and at Kp8 you also have a chance in our country. The index is an average: there may be higher and lower peaks.”
To predict
Northern Lights are notoriously difficult to predict and often remain uncertain until the very last moment. According to Wouter van Bernebeek, the focus this time is on the night from Friday to Saturday and the night from Saturday to Sunday. But there may still be something to see during the night from Sunday to Monday.
“There appear to be two or three separate solar flares (merged or not) on their way to Earth, with the first likely arriving between 8 p.m. Friday evening and 5 a.m. Saturday night,” he reports on his website. “The average of the calculations then logically arrives somewhere around midnight on Friday evening. It concerns a broad period, but these types of things cannot be calculated much more accurately.”
The night from Saturday to Sunday also promises to be “spectacular”, according to Bart Medaer. But he also warns that predicting the Northern Lights is difficult. “You also have to have a bit of luck,” he says. “Outbursts sometimes only last a few minutes and they are not always intense. Sometimes they are very clear, sometimes you only see a green glow, at other times it looks more like a cloud. A tip: look at it or take a photo of it with your mobile phone. He often perceives the colors better.”
Benefit
The advantage this weekend is that the moon will not be a disruptor. The disadvantage is that the nights are already becoming quite short. And during the day or at dusk, the aurora borealis is barely visible, if at all. Therefore, always stand in a dark place with little light pollution when scanning the sky. “The timing of the arrival of a solar flare will be crucial,” said Wouter van Bernebeek.
If you want to check whether the conditions are good for aurora borealis, you can visit the website www.poollicht.be. There you see the Kp index at the top. You can also get an automatic alert via the SpaceWeatherLive app in the Google Play Store or the App Store, or the special page on X.
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