Space Weather in La Grange from 1918
This is an older story of a very peculiar phenomenon that happened over La Grange way back in March 1918, during the height of the Great War. This comes from an article in the La Grange Journal on March 14, 1918.
The story was placed in between a war ad telling people to slim down on food use so they can give the surplus to England and France, and an ad for snake oil.
On the night of March 7, the article said, “The bright red glare in the North Thursday night was plainly visible from the hill to the North of the city, and seen by many people living in the city, created some comment, many believing that there was a fire in the neighborhood. The glare lasted for about a half hour. It has now developed that the illumination was the aurora borealis”
It goes on to further explain the definition of an aurora borealis from “The standard dictionary,” which explains that red is the most common color and its very rarely seen as green, which points me toward what actually happened. (Yes I am fact checking an article from a paper in small town Texas from 1918).
So what actually happened? Well, from all of the accounts of this phenomenon is that, first of all this wasn’t just seen in central Texas but most of the continental United states, as there are reports of this happening from Connecticut to Chicago and all the way down to Brownsville. Second, this wasn’t an aurora borealis event as that is only seen at the extreme high latitudes, past the arctic circle high, where the most common color is green, the most probable cause of this event was a solar flare, or in fancy words a coronal mass ejection.
This gets into the field of space weather, even though it has a stupid name that is the official term for it.
Space weather is exactly as it sounds like, looking at the weather of space and even forecasting it. Most of it is to do with satellites and astronauts, but also the really scary things like coronal mass ejections and geomagnetic storms, those last two fry anything electrical in the vicinity, and what I mean by the vicinity is half the planet.
So what happened on March 7, 1918, the most probable cause is a weak coronal mass ejection, so the light they saw was the atmosphere reacting with supercharged particles that came out of a sun volcano the size of the Earth from 91 million miles away, which could have set the world back about 200 years, but we got lucky.
On another note I am now back at college and need your suggestions or questions more than ever to keep making these articles. You can contact the paper and I will get those messages forwarded to me or you can contact me directly with this email address tomy3290@gmail.com. Any topics are greatly appreciated as the semester is in full swing. Now onto your local weather.
Thanksgiving week is looking to be on par with the rest of Fall so far with an average high around 80 in the day and dropping to the mid 50’s at night, with a 50% chance of showers on Tuesday afternoon with a slight front that is coming in that will hopefully clear out some of the humidity. No astronomical events to report. Have a great Thanksgiving and thanks and Gig’em!