Californians see rare display of northern lights

University of Washington senior Anthony Edwards was headed back to Seattle from a spring break road trip to the San Francisco Bay Area when a friend mentioned he might be able to see the northern lights from as far south as California late Thursday.

From his hotel in

Yreka — not far from the Oregon border — Edwards drove a few minutes east to try to escape any manmade light that could interfere with his view of the phenomenon, scientifically known as the aurora borealis.

Before he made it even a few minutes out of the small Siskiyou County town, he said he began to notice a green hue along the horizon.

When he stopped a little farther out, he said the green light was really noticeable, and his camera was able to pick up some of the purple.

“I wasn’t expecting it yesterday,” Edwards said, who described himself as a weather enthusiast, studying meteorology and journalism in college. “Seeing it for the first time this far south is crazy. … It was awesome.”

Space weather experts had predicted that a “severe geomagnetic storm” Thursday evening might make the northern lights — typically only seen in regions close to the North Pole — visible to a much larger geographical area, as far south as Northern California and even northern Alabama.

“We really haven’t had anything like this in several years,” said

Bill Murtagh, program coordinator for the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “The aurora was indeed visible in the mid-latitude states.”

While he called the southern showing of the northern lights “fairly rare,” it’s not unheard of. The most recent such display occurred in 2017, he said.