Observations of Low‐Latitude Red Aurora in Mexico During the 1859 Carrington Geomagnetic Storm

Abstract

One of the most intense geomagnetic storm that has been documented in recent history occurred on 1 September 1859. This storm is known as the Carrington Event. In the morning of 1 September at around 11:15 UT, Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson observed in England, independently and for the first time, an intense white light solar flare. About 17 hr after this solar event, there occurred the strongest geomagnetic perturbation ever recorded as well as a greatly extended red aurora, which covered unusually at low latitudes. The red auroral display on 2 September was reported in regions where this kind of phenomena is very rare, like in Cuba and Hawaii. Until now however, it was not known to scientists that the low‐latitude red aurora is also registered in Mexico. At that time, Mexico was in a civil war, and there were very difficult conditions in where to establish astronomical and magnetic observatories. Nevertheless, the geomagnetic storm was observed with a maximum intensity between 7:00 and 8:00 UTC and was reported to a Mexican newspaper from five different locations (Mexico City, Querétaro, Guadalajara, Hidalgo, and Guanajuato) and registered also from at least in two additional sites (Michoacán and San Luis Potosí) in other historical documents. These records confirm that the Carrington geomagnetic storm was a global event with planetary repercussions, and that the Mexican low‐latitude region is susceptible to significant effects associated with intense space weather events.

Temporal and Spatial Evolutions of a Large Sunspot Group and Great Auroral Storms Around the Carrington Event in 1859

“…For the auroral visibility, we consulted the observational reports in the yearbook of the Russian Central Observatory (Kupffer, ) and the Armagh Observatory (MS 117; see Butler & Hoskin, ), newspapers in Portugal, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil, and further Japanese diaries and Mexican newspapers (see supporting information Texts S2.1–S2.5). We then compare them with the known records reviewed in Hayakawa, Ebihara, Hand, et al (): reports in contemporary scientific journals ( American Journal of Science and Wochenschrift für Astronomie, Meteorologie und Geographie ; see Heis, , ), ship logs (see Green et al, ; Green & Boardsen, ), Australian records (see Humble, ; Neumeyer, ), newspapers in Spain and Mexico (see Farrona et al, ; González‐Esparza & Cuevas‐Cardona, ), Scandinavian reports (see Rubenson, , ; Trombolt, ) and East Asian historical documents (see Hayakawa et al, , Hayakawa, Ebihara, Hand, et al, ). We compute MLAT of the observing sites in the reports, based on the archaeomagnetic field model GUFM1 model covering the position of magnetic dipoles from 1590 to 2000 (Jackson et al, ).…”

“…Note that throughout this report, we use the terms "sunspot group" and "active region" as synonyms. We also recover and examine the contemporary auroral reports in the Russian and Japanese archival material, revise the temporal and spatial evolutions of the auroral visibility using known auroral reports (Farrona et al, 2011;González-Esparza & Cuevas-Cardona, 2018;Hayakawa et al, 2016, Hayakawa, Ebihara, Hand, et al, 2018Humble, 2006;Kimball, 1960;Moreno Cárdenas et al, 2016), and compare them with available magnetograms (Kumar et al, 2016;Nevanlinna, 2006Nevanlinna, , 2008. With this 10.1029/2019SW002269 Space Weather combined information, we contextualize the results in conjunction with those of the other extreme magnetic storms in observational history (see Chapman, 1957a).…”

Uma andorinha só não faz verão: 160 anos do legado de Richard Carrington

“…Os efeitos dessa perturbação no campo magnético terrestre, ou tempestade magnética, foram rapidamente notados em escalas globais. Auroras boreais e austrais foram vistas em diversas regiões de baixas latitudes (menores que 60 • ), incluindo Havaí, Flórida, e Washington, D.C. nos Estados Unidos [23][24][25], México [26], Colômbia [27], Espanha [28], Austrália [29],Ásia Oriental [30] e Chile, Portugal, leste da Rússia, Austrália e Nova Zelândia [31]. A Fig.…”

Ancient Auroral Records Compiled From Korean Historical Books

“…Since Fritz (1873) first identified an ancient aurora list from historical books, many astronomers and space physicists have constructed regional or global lists of ancient auroral records for different purposes with respective emphasizes, such as Link (1964) for years before 1700, Silverman and Blanchard (1983) for England observations from 1883 to 1931, Lee et al (2004) from Korea histories in the 11th-18th century, and Hayakawa et al (2017a) for Chinese ancient records during 1261-1644. Based on these auroral lists, a variety of studies have been done over decades, especially on estimating the ancient solar and geomagnetic activities due to their dominated effect on the aurora occurrence.…”