Derek Kevra: Why we could see Northern Lights tonight

(WJBK) - Sky watches across Michigan with a chance of seeing the Northern Lights tonight and meteorologist Derek Kevra explains why. 

Happening right now is a G-1 class geo-magnetic storm tracking place on the surface of the sun. Parts of the sun get so hot that they ejected off coronal mass ejections and push charged particles throughout outer space. Eventually that interacts with earth.

That is combined with a little crack in the sun's atmosphere that's allowing a lot of solar wind to shoot that out. What does all of that mean for us?  It impacts us in the way of the Northern Lights. 

We talk about this a lot at the end of summer. but this time of the year we can also get some Northern Lights we may be in line to see some tonight. 

With that charged mass shooting away from the sun, we are right between high chance and low chance - and a little closer to the low chance. 

The better probability and possibility is farther off to the north. But if you get out and see them it would be very late tonight and very low on the horizon. 

As the charge particle from the sun interact with the very outer edge of the earth's atmosphere it's called the ionosphere.

Plenty of people wonder will this impact any communication satellite cell phones when it's a smaller geomagnetic storm like this one, it will not. 

We are going to keep our fingers crossed here in Michigan that we might get a glimpse of these tonight.