M3.7 coronal mass ejection

Thursday, 5 November 2015 01:06 UTC

M3.7 coronal mass ejection

Yesterday at 13:52 UTC, a long duration M3.7 (R1-minor) solar flare took place near sunspot region 2443. It released a coronal mass ejection that will likely arrive at our planet during the evening hours on Saturday, 7 November.

For more information be sure to read our previous news article.

A very decent coronal mass ejection was expected from this event as this was a long duration solar flare. SDO showed coronal dimming and NOAA directly reported IV and II radio sweeps. Now that we have enough SOHO LASCO coronagraph imagery we have to conclude that the coronal mass ejection isn't as impressive as we expected.

Animations: SOHO LASCO C2 and C3 coronagraph imagery showing the CME released by the M3.7 solar flare.

A rather faint coronal mass ejection emerged following the solar flare. Most of the ejecta looks to be heading southwest of the ecliptic but there is an earth-directed component. CACtus only gives us a speed of about 500km/s for this coronal mass ejection which isn't much faster than the ambient solar wind. We do not expect a major impact but high latitude sky watchers should be alert for aurora when the plasma cloud arrives. Impact time for this coronal mass ejection considering the speed of this coronal mass ejection should be in the evening (UTC timezone) hours of Saturday 7 November 2015 which we calculated by using the Drag-Based Model. Minor G1 geomagnetic storming conditions are expected at most.

Coronal hole solar wind stream

We should note that a solar wind stream from a southern extension of the northern hemisphere polar coronal hole could become geo-effective after the arrival of this coronal mass ejection, possibly on Sunday 8 November or Monday 9 November. Be sure to follow us on Twitter if you immediately wish to be notified once the coronal hole faces Earth.

Any mentioned solar flare in this article has a scaling factor applied by the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), the reported solar flares are 42% smaller than for the science quality data. The scaling factor has been removed from our archived solar flare data to reflect the true physical units.

Thank you for reading this article! Did you have any trouble with the technical terms used in this article? Our help section is the place to be where you can find in-depth articles, a FAQ and a list with common abbreviations. Still puzzled? Just post on our forum where we will help you the best we can! Never want to miss out on a space weather event or one of our news articles again? Subscribe to our mailing list, follow us on Twitter and Facebook and download the SpaceWeatherLive app for Android and iOS!

Latest news

Support SpaceWeatherLive.com!

A lot of people come to SpaceWeatherLive to follow the Sun's activity or if there is aurora to be seen, but with more traffic comes higher server costs. Consider a donation if you enjoy SpaceWeatherLive so we can keep the website online!

100%
Support SpaceWeatherLive with our merchandise
Check out our merchandise

Latest alerts

Get instant alerts!

Space weather facts

Last X-flare2024/11/06X2.39
Last M-flare2024/11/22M1.0
Last geomagnetic storm2024/11/10Kp5+ (G1)
Spotless days
Last spotless day2022/06/08
Monthly mean Sunspot Number
October 2024166.4 +25
November 2024144.1 -22.3
Last 30 days158 +10.7

This day in history*

Solar flares
11998X3.24
21998M4.53
32013M1.69
42000M1.56
52013M1.54
DstG
11997-108G3
21982-101G2
31959-95G2
41991-84G1
51981-81
*since 1994

Social networks