Northern Lights: How IT and Data Science Unveil the Mysteries of the Aurora Borealis

    This week, the aurora borealis obscured the skies over Calgary on two occasions: October 7 and 10, 2024. This interaction of solar particles and the Earth’s geomagnetic field creates auroras at high latitudes. The dancing lights occur because the solar wind cannot dissipate the geomagnetized electric belt. And it is common for auroras to occur with greater chances at the autumn and spring equinoxes, around September and March, respectively. This is largely due to the increased probability of the solar wind interacting with the Earth’s geomagnetic field around these periods. In IT, space monitoring systems, such as NASA’s THEMIS mission and the European Space Agency’s Swarm satellites, make these measurements using solar wind and geomagnetic monitoring sensors, which in turn send this data to servers and networks, whose algorithms model the Earth’s geomagnetic field so far. 

Thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning, it is possible to identify patterns in large volumes of data and make predictions about upcoming geomagnetic storms. Similarly, cloud technologies are essential in this infrastructure so that data can be accessed and processed in real time, allowing platforms such as “My Aurora ‘Forecast’” and sites such as Space Weather Live to invoke an API to, among many others, provide instant information about auroral activity in the sky. Mobile applications use this data to base visual forecasts, alerts and interactive maps for the public on parameters similar to the KP Index, which is an index of geomagnetic disturbance. In terms of IT infrastructure, these platforms use cloud services such as Azure and AWS for scalable storage and mass processing, ensuring that users in other locations, such as Calgary, can receive fast alerts and accurate forecasts to help protect power grids and communication systems, which are often affected by solar storms.



Captured in Calgary on October 7th, 2024
A stunning display of the Northern Lights dancing across the night sky.







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