Aurora as a space weather event in the Locarno region

Many enthusiasts travel as far as Scandinavia to admire one of the greatest natural phenomena: the aurora borealis. Which, however, sometimes does not disdain being seen even at lower latitudes, such as ours. Over the past few years, many reports have also arrived from Ticino, captured by the local media with a lot of images produced by occasional observers. Perhaps because the aurora has become a more frequent phenomenon?

Indeed, the solar activity is now at its maximum and complex magnetic regions on the Sun frequently produce large flares. These are often followed by coronal mass ejections which burst solar plasma into other space causing space weather events, beautifully illustrated by auroras, both borealis and australis. Other lucky coincidences are that thanks to smartphones, almost everyone now has a video camera in their pocket and can capture events that were once only fixed in the memory, and for auroras the sky should be clear from clouds too.

This is why auroras are of particular interest to solar scientists, such as IRSOL researchers, who study our star in order to seek effective methods of predicting the most violent solar phenomena and space weather events. Currently, auroras can be roughly forecasted by the geomagnetic storm index which is published online by, e.g., ESA and NASA, and this can be related with the level of the solar activity to further improve the space weather forecast. This is why, on October 10, 2024,, Svetlana Berdyugina, director of IRSOL, and Michele Bianda, former director, went to the south-west shore of Lago Maggiore across Locarno to capture spectacular photographs of the deep-red aurora which was visible to the naked eye.