Increased solar activity causes auroras that dance around Earth’s poles, known as the northern lights, or aurora borealis, and southern lights, or aurora australis. When the energized particles from coronal mass ejections reach Earth’s magnetic field, they interact with gases in the atmosphere to create different colored lights in the sky.

Northern Lights may dazzle again tonight as a severe geomagnetic storm reaches peak intensity across regions. Follow live.

More than 10 inches of snow was expected to fall in some areas south and west of Lake Michigan. The cold system was expected to move further east on Tuesday.

That so-called “rain shadow” often occurs in atmospheric rivers, according to the weather service. The phenomenon causes the lifting of the system as it moves over mountains and hills and leaves less precipitation for areas that surround it.

After hitting the San Francisco Bay Area on Wednesday, the storm system is expected to arrive in Southern California on Thursday.

Typhoon Fung-wong weakened into a tropical storm over the South China Sea and was moving northwest toward Taiwan, where it could hit Thursday.

Hurricane-force winds were whipping up 40-foot waves as part of the early winter storm on Nov. 11-12 that cut a wide swath of destruction from Kansas into Michigan.