I'm in the air right now from Vancouver to SF and though the sky is dark since the cloud layer is blocking the city lights, I saw nothing over Washington at 25k feet and over Oregon at 33k feet. Kept eye out from 2030 to 2130 Pacific.
From https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast it looks like we took off too late for the high energy phase (happened around 15 UTC to 19 UTC, which is 8 Pacific to 11 Pacific when it was sunny). I would not have seen it.
I expect more from NOAA getting "tonight's" and "tomorrow night's" more clearly communicated on their site using UTC. Not sure that site's graphic uses my browser locale.
I agree - I'm seeing a "creation time" which simply seems to be set to the current UTC time whenever I refresh it. This map seems to bear little resemblance to the 30-minute forecast for the current time, which shows very little activity.
It's 24 hours of past 30 minute forecasts + one additional 30 miniute forcast (into "the future")
eg: Data collected at the L1 point at 2024-03-25 02:51 (UTC) is transmitted to earth, feed into the NOAA model which creates AT 2024-03-25 03:00 (UTC) (nine minutes after the L1 observations) a forecast for 2024-03-25 03:31 (UTC) (31 minutes after "present time" when model run using data observed nine minutes earlier)
This was my complaint as well. I have no idea what "tonight" and "tomorrow" mean in the context of those images. The creation times help me kind of understand but it'd have been way nicer if they'd have just said "The night of 03/25/2024" or something.
Ah ya, I've been refreshing the 30 minute forecast and playing back the last few hours. It doesn't seem to be progressing south towards Seattle at all unfortunately.
And I hadn't even thought about cloud coverage (ty!). Agree tonight's probably not the night.
Appreciate the effort to keep HN in a good place, but I'm not sure the rules above apply here. While related, tropes and memes are technically distinct concepts.
Why is the "Approximate Energy Deposition" (!= visibility?) on the side facing the sun much lower than on the side facing away from the sun? Shouldn't it be about the same?
It might have something to do with the shape of Earth's magnetic field lines and the way they extend away from the sun but are compressed toward the sun. Aurora, in turn, is caused by the spiraling of charged particles that are captured in these field lines and since the field is stronger on the dark side of earth it seems reasonable that you would see more particles on the dark side. We're casting a wider net there.
In the United States, the National Weather Service defines a blizzard as a
severe snow storm characterized by strong winds causing blowing snow that
results in low visibilities. The difference between a blizzard and a snowstorm
is the strength of the wind, not the amount of snow. To be a blizzard, a snow
storm must have sustained winds or frequent gusts that are greater than or
equal to 56 km/h (35 mph) with blowing or drifting snow which reduces
visibility to 400 m or 0.25 mi or less and must last for a prolonged period
of time—typically three hours or more.
From https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast it looks like we took off too late for the high energy phase (happened around 15 UTC to 19 UTC, which is 8 Pacific to 11 Pacific when it was sunny). I would not have seen it.