They exude a touch of magic: Northern lights are welcome everywhere, especially in Carinthia and East Tyrol after the celestial spectacle appeared in May this year. The Northern Lights were announced for us again in the last few days – but they didn’t materialize. But why?
Mass ejection passed by
A comparatively high probability of northern lights was expected, especially for the night from Saturday to Sunday. Steffen Dietz, meteorologist at the weather service UBIMET, explains why this didn’t happen in an interview with the Kleine Zeitung: “There were actually two powerful coronal mass ejections on the sun. But in the end they didn’t hit us the way we expected.” Beautifully visible northern lights only happened in Sweden and the North Cape.
“Many factors have to come into play”
In general, many factors have to come together, as Dietz explains: “The timing simply has to be right. The peaks of the solar winds must reach us at night. There should be no backlight and the moon should be on the other side. And of course the weather has to cooperate, the sky has to be clear.”
Incidentally, the meteorologist cannot say when it will be possible to observe the northern lights in Austria again, because: “This can only ever be predicted in a timely manner, anything else would be dubious.”
