Will we see northern lights again Friday night in the Hudson Valley? What we found out

Itching for another chance Friday night to see the northern lights swirl red and green across Lower Hudson Valley skies?

Well, the odds are not as good as they were for Thursday’s dazzling light show .

“Not nearly as good of a chance to see aurora tonight from the Lower Hudson Valley,” said Shawn Dahl, a forecaster with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, “but it could be possible if a substorm is going on or the [coronal mass ejection]’s passage trailing end has not passed beyond Earth just yet.”

On Thursday night, Facebook and Instagram accounts filled with night-sky photos suffused with shades of red, pink and green as the aurora borealis swept over us. It was a clear night to view the skies.

Friday's weather forecast is for mostly clear night sky.

Dahl was among federal officials who gave Wednesday’s news briefing ahead of the geomagnetic storm — for which the coronal mass ejection, or CME, was the key ingredient — that created the aurora's visibility around the country and world. He said Friday the CME’s “arrival and passage has mostly passed over Earth now and we are on the waning back end of it we believe. But still, the outer atmosphere is still rather enhanced and it will take a bit for it to settle down, so brief surges in the form of what we call sub-storms are possible.”

A CME, expelled from the sun, traveled at high speed toward Earth, arriving at 11:15 a.m. eastern time on Thursday. When it reacts with the planet's magnetic field in the way that space-weather forecasters had expected, then a storm can have effects. Along with the ethereal lights in the sky, it can potentially disrupt communication systems that depend on certain satellites. More stress could be put on power grids, with particular concern areas hit by hurricanes. GPS navigation, especially those needed during disaster relief, may be degraded.

SWPC officials said they reached out to the power grid officials about solar storm predictions so that there would be time to prepare

The storms’ intensity are measure on a G-scale: G4 and G5 are considered severe and extreme, respectively. Thursday night went into G4 territory, according to an SWPC update on its website.

Dahl said of Friday that “we still think G1 or maybe even a brief G2 are possible” — those are minor and moderate, respectively. A description of the measurements on the SWPC website said that with G2 storms, “aurora has been seen as low as New York and Idaho (typically 55 degrees geomagnetic lat.)” and, at G1, “aurora is commonly visible at high latitudes (northern Michigan and Maine).”

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Will we see northern lights again Friday night in the Hudson Valley? What we found out