Anyone who missed out the northern lights last weekend may get another chance to see them, as experts predict they are likely to occur more frequently.
last weekend, Bands of pink and green light, known as aurora borealis, lit up the night skywith rare sightings across the UK, Europe and the northern hemisphere after an “extreme” geomagnetic storm made them more visible, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Krista Hammond, a space weather forecaster at the Met Office, said the phenomenon was likely to become more frequent over the next few years – but not uniformly.
“It all depends on what is known as the sun’s solar cycle. The sun has an activity cycle of about 11 years, and it goes from what is known as solar minimum, which then goes to solar maximum, and back to solar minimum. And we are now approaching solar maximum,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“What defines solar maximum is when we see the most sunspots on the sun. And it’s sunspots floating that we see as space weather, which are solar flares.
Hammond added: “As we approach solar maximum, that means the frequency that we see these space weather events, which cause the aurora, increases. But that doesn’t actually determine the magnitude of those events.
“What we saw last weekend was quite a unique situation. We have had several bursts of plasma from the sun, which also overtook each other when it arrived at Earth. And then, when it interacted with the earth’s upper atmosphere, magnetic field, we thought of it as the aurora.
“And it coincided with clear skies, and it arrived overnight, so we could see it very far south. We got views across the UK from last weekend’s event.
“So while we would expect to see it more in the way of space weather, whether it’s of the magnitude that allows us to see it at these southern latitudes is a little harder to predict.”
The northern lights have been spotted in Whitley Bay on the north east coast, Essex, Cambridgeshire and Wokingham in Berkshire. They have also been seen in Suffolk, Kent, Hampshire and Liverpool.
