Comment by echelon

18 days ago

Have we been having these more recently?

I don't ever recall seeing these in the news so frequently. It feels like there are several a year now. A decade ago, never.

And I also never remember seeing Aurora at my latitudes.

Do we just have better sensing now, or is there some cycle on a period longer than a few years? Or maybe I'm crazy and just never noticed.

3 comments

echelon

Reply
0manrho  18 days ago

Mid to late 2025 was the peak of an 11 year solar cycle (25th one since we've started keeping track). We're on the trailing end of that peak activity now, which is why the past year/several months has seemed so active compared to recent years past, and should decrease significantly (in frequency and intensity) as 2026 progresses.

There was also a fairly significant geomagnetic storm back in November of 2025 as well.

You can see the data here at NOAA's Space Weather site https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/solar-cycle-progression

ErroneousBosh  18 days ago

> Have we been having these more recently?

Yes, for suitable values of "recently".

> And I also never remember seeing Aurora at my latitudes.

How old are you?

If you're younger than say your mid-40s you probably won't remember the early 80s, which is the last time we had a solar maximum that really came to anything.

Solar activity rises and falls on an 11-year cycle, and right now we're experiencing quite a peak. The previous three, peaking in 2014, 2011, and 1989 were a bit of a bust.

There was a massive peak in 1979 and I can remember my dad showing me the aurora when I was about six or seven - it seemed to be present most nights over the winter. That was also around the time of the CB Radio craze, where atmospheric conditions were such that you could use "skip" - bouncing radio signals off the highly-charged ionosphere - to talk to people hundreds of miles away as if they were just down the road, even on the comparatively high frequencies that CB used. There was a bit of a peak in the late 80s, and some good RF propagation too, as well as some incredible aurora - although the big one I remember was in about the end of 1991, early 1992.

We had absolutely blistering hot summers followed by really cold and snowy winters, too, kind of like we're having at the moment.

If the solar cycles have a longer repeating cycle of intensity on the scale of a hundred years or so (and it looks a bit like they do) then the next solar maximum in about 2036 is going to be even bigger.