Are the Northern Lights ‘weather’

All in the title really, would you call the Northern (or indeed Southern) Lights ‘weather’?

Solar weather not really terrestrial.

No

https://www.spaceweather.com/

Don’t think so as they are the result of solar winds reacting with the earth’s outer atmosphere and have no effect on our climate or weather.

Consensus of ‘no’ so far.

So what is ‘weather’ then? Is it just air moving about, winds, and precipitation, rain, snow, fog?

The Northern Lights aren’t the Northern Lights until the solar winds get here and interact with our atmosphere, is that different to the heat from the sun causing the air to move, making winds? Sunny is a kind of weather, and that’s just solar emmissions too.

The Northern Lights aren’t the Northern Lights until the solar winds get here and interact with our atmosphere, is that different to the heat from the sun causing the air to move, making winds

There’s magnetosphere involvement with the aurora which there isn’t with weather.

Weather is mainly in the troposphere and a small mount in the stratosphere – the two layers of the atmosphere closest to the earth at  less than 7 miles for the troposphere and 30 miles altitude for the stratosphere.  Aurora is in the thermosphere at between 50 and 400 miles of altitude.  Ie about the same altitude as the ISS – no weather in this bit as its incredibly rarified

Classed as space weather, along with solar flares and CMD’s, which can have profound effects on terrestrial systems, causing entire electrical distribution systems to fail.
As solar radiation, ie sunlight, affects our weather. Aurora are a visual indicator that there’s strong solar activity at work in our upper atmosphere, even if you can’t feel it, or even really see it with the naked eye, a phone can reveal what’s going on.

No fancy shenanigans were carried out on these photos…

With ‘weather’ in the conventional sense of sunny, dry, wet, windy as a system that has so many complex and nuanced inputs I’d be surprised if in the broadest analysis that ‘space’ weather doesn’t influence ‘earth’ weather to some extent. Solar flair activity subtly effects all sorts of systems  but with such a light touch its only really apparent in a meta analysis.

Weather is a factor in whether the northern lights are in anyway visible, so there’s a weather aspect to the phenomenon.  Weather also dictates whether on not we can see the sun on a sunny day, but the sun itself isn’t the ‘weather’ even though we’d describe the weather as ‘sunny’. The sun is also fundamentally the principle energy that drives the whole system. If we simply switched the sun off its fair to expect we might experience some interesting weather – so it seems unlikely that solar wind doesn’t have at least some nuanced interaction with the weather as a whole. What would make that effect difficult to isolate is that solar winds are a constant phenomena, the northern lights are just the particular conditions in which they are visible