So on the way back I saw that the clouds were breaking and I
figured, you know, this is probably the way it's going to happen.
And of course, it's gonna happen just as the show's over.
So I turned the corner and in my back door, which would face North,
and I see a faint green glow.
And I'm like, I cannot believe, is that the aurora?
Is that what I'm seeing?
Hello and welcome to the Weather Whys podcast.
It's been a minute.
I'm your host, Ed Oswald, and in this episode, we'll start out with
a personal story of sorts, But the main purpose of this episode is to
give you an update on what's been happening we've been absent for the
past couple of weeks, months, actually.
Unlike most episodes, this one is a little more unscripted than the others.
So we'll see how it goes.
Hopefully I don't veer too much off topic.
So let's get started.
So we'll start out with what's perhaps the biggest weather
story these past few weeks.
And actually it's not a weather story of anything here on planet
earth, but rather in space.
On May 11th, a series of solar storms hit Earth and it ended up causing
the best Northern Lights show in 35 years, and it was visible by the naked
eye almost anywhere in the United States, didn't matter if you were in
the northern part where you usually see them, I had friends in Mobile,
Alabama who saw the Northern Lights, I saw pictures from Miami, even pictures
from Cuba, Mexico, it was just crazy.
It was widespread, visibility much more than usual.
And of course Like I had expected, what would happen if something like this
would ever occur, it was cloudy, and we had a persistent easterly flow across
most of the Mid Atlantic, the Northeast.
If you were anywhere in that area, you could not see
anything for the entire show.
Which is what I thought would happen, and the pictures were just so
amazing, but I couldn't see anything.
So me and my mom even drove northward, hoping that maybe if we get far enough
north and into the mountains, maybe we get above the stratus deck, that failed.
We saw what we thought might've been lights, but it could just
been the reflection of the city lights on the low clouds.
We were just weren't sure.
And, so we just gave up, you know, Hey, that's the way it happens.
So around 2:30 in the morning of the, I believe it would've been the 12th then,
I was walking to the convenience store and I figured, okay, we're not gonna
actually see anything here tonight.
So on the way back I saw that the clouds were breaking and I
figured, you know, this is probably the way it's going to happen.
And of course, it's gonna happen just as the show's over.
So I turned the corner and in my back door, which would face North,
and I see a faint green glow.
And I'm like, I cannot believe, is that the aurora?
Is that what I'm seeing?
And sure enough, they tell you to take your smartphone camera, if you think you
see it and point it, because the exposure time is longer than the human eye.
So it picks it up.
So once I did that, it showed so much more.
There was pillars, the pillars that you see, which you can see in the pictures
that I've attached to the show notes.
They were bright green and pink.
If you'd even see it moving, which they say that sometimes you'll be
able to watch the Northern Lights move if you watch it long enough.
I had to even wake my mom up, just so she would see it.
And I thought, never was going to see it in person, but at least I can Mark
that off the list, and it was just a great experience, and we're still
headed into the solar maximum here in the next couple of months into 2025.
So there's plenty more opportunities.
Probably nothing like what we had this past month, but it could be
something that, again, for at least the northern half of the U.
S.
And hopefully at that time we can see it here in Pennsylvania,
and it won't be cloudy.
So if you saw the Aurora, I would love to know what you thought,
and please, send us an email.
You can send it to info@theweatherstationexperts.com.
Again, that's info@weatherstationexperts.com.
We'd love to hear your stories.
So switching gears, and I did say that, I wanted to talk about what's been going on.
Four months without any episodes and I had said that we had everything
lined up things changed dramatically.
A lot of things Happened with the website.
Google decided to change their algorithm Totally without telling us really
anything and we lost a lot of our traffic.
So it caused us to rethink everything, and one of the big
changes that we made is videos.
Kind of does what we originally planned for this podcast to do.
So our focus right now is going to be that, pictures speak
a thousand words as they say.
We're going to experiment with that, but we didn't want to completely
forget about the podcast, so we're going to experiment with this as well.
The good thing is that we somewhat have episodes already recorded.
So we just need to get this one recorded first, just to give you an update on how
things are going to change a little bit.
Once every two weeks to a month is hopefully the frequency that
we'll be posting new episodes.
Also along with the podcast changes, you can go to
weatherwhys.Show, that's W H Y S.
And you can check that and we also redesigned theweatherstationexperts.Com.
It's a visual first design.
We worked on site speed.
Things are getting a lot faster.
A lot of those things are things that Google's looking for right now.
So we're trying a bunch of things to see what Google wants because they
kind of just changed everything on us, and we had Little to no warning.
So we're just guessing right now.
That's pretty much what we're doing.
Also, when you go on our website, as well subscribing to the podcast, you can
subscribe to the weather station experts.
Click on subscribe on the menu on the upper right hand corner, that
will give you access to exclusive content, including infographics.
Added that as well the videos you don't have to subscribe to watch But we might
even add some exclusive podcast episodes.
We haven't thought too much about that.
So we're gonna Think of new things and we'll keep you
updated anything that changes.
Of course, we'll mention here in the podcast.
That's all the time we have for this episode Things went really well for
not having a script, so maybe we'll do it again sometime, but if you have
any questions, comments, let us know, info@theweatherstationexperts.com
is our email address.
Thanks for tuning into the Weather Whys Podcast, and stay weatherwise.