Birds flying north for the spring and humans relying on global positioning satellites to navigate could get a little lost this weekend.
Three coronal holes spread across the sun are pointing at Earth. As a result, a minor geo- magnetic storm alert has been issued for Saturday by the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder.
Forecasters in the U.S. and Britain predict this could confuse migrating birds and other animals, cause minor problems with satellites and make an aurora visible as far south as Maine and Michigan.
The storms could rise to the G2 level on a five-step scale, which would mean the northern lights might be seen in New York and some electrical transformers could be damaged. Viewed through X-ray telescopes, coronal holes can appear to be vast, dark, blank spaces in the sun’s swirling atmosphere. They are the places where the sun’s magnetic lines don’t return to the surface. Bloomberg News
