Russian scientists have developed a service called Aurora (in Roman mythology, Aurora is the goddess of the morning dawn, and the northern lights are called Aurora Borealis) to predict the lights. It is still being tested, but now anyone can use it.
“The researchers from the Ufa State Aviation Technical University under the leadership of associate professor Andrei Vorobyev, together with the Institute of Earth Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Geophysical Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, have created a web-based geographic information system (web-GIS) of the aurora forecast that has no analogues in the world. It provides a short-term forecast of the intensity of auroras in real time”, TASS quoted the press office of the Education and Science Ministry.
As the ministry explained, for forecasting the model uses the parameters of the solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field, continuously obtained from the ACE and DSCOVR satellites located on the Earth-Sun line and 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth.Now the service is at the beta testing stage, but it is already available both for specialists and for any interested users at this link.
As specialists say, Taimyr residents will not often observe the northern lights in the next few years. This is due to low solar activity.
Text: Victor Tsaryov, Photo: photosight.ru
