NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — At the National Weather Service office in Nashville, they're used to forecasts without much notice. But Thursday night's sky was picture-perfect.
"Perfectly clear skies last night," said Ryan Husted, the Warning Coordination Meteorologist at the National Weather Service. "It has to be the strongest of strong storms to even have a chance down here."
The official name for it is Aurora Borealis. But we wanted to know, what's causing these northern lights to take such a deep trip down south?
"We’ve had a couple really strong geomagnetic storms," said Husted.
More specifically, Husted says it has to do with solar disturbances released from the sun.
"A basic explosion of material, it’s plasma that is sent out. And when that interacts with our magnetic field on Earth, that’s what leads to these channels of light you see," he said. "These electrons are colliding with the gas, which that’s what makes it really bright."
The result? Nothing short of magical. Clear skies Thursday night meant everywhere from Ashland City to Lafayette saw the dazzling display. Excited NewsChannel 5 viewers flooded our weather team with pictures, which meant Meteorologist Nikki-Dee Ray had the joy of looking through all of them.
"I went through, I can’t tell you, probably upwards of 100 plus separate emails," said Ray. "That’s not including the pictures within the emails of all of the northern lights."
Of course, for a lot of people, they couldn't actually see them.
"You couldn’t see it with the naked eye, you did have to get your camera out to actually observe it," said Nikki-Dee.
That's because our phone does a better job of seeing the light and keeping the camera's exposure open than our own eyes can do. Being out of the city, like on top of Mount LeConte in the Great Smoky Mountains, sure helps too.
"The more out you go, the better you got," Ray said.
We may not have gotten much warning, but for those who got word, no words really did it justice.
"To see that here was just pretty amazing," said Husted.
So what are the odds of seeing the northern lights again tonight? Not great.
Solar disturbances are dying back down again. However, there is a decent chance they could flare up again later this year.
Do you have more information about this story? You can email me at Chris.Davis@newschannel5.com.
For people of my generation, in our younger days we spent part of our weekends watching music shows like American Bandstand and Soul Train. That was before the age of music videos. Several years before Soul Train was syndicated out of Chicago, another syndicated R&B show was taped in Nashville at NewsChannel 5. Night Train aired in the 60s and included what may have been the first TV appearance for legendary guitarist Jimi Hendrix. Forrest Sanders has another great look back at station history.
-Lelan Statom
