Small coronal hole faces Earth

Saturday, 9 January 2016 22:49 UTC

Small coronal hole faces Earth

A small coronal hole is currently facing Earth and an enhanced solar wind stream could arrive in about 3 days from now on 12 January.

Solar activity is rather quiet at the moment and no significant solar flares have occured since sunspot region 2473 departed the Earth-facing solar disk.

That means we have to turn our attention once more to coronal hole for enhanced auroral displays and right now we have a small coronal hole in an Earth-facing position. This prompted the NOAA SWPC to issue a minor G1 geomagnetic storm watch for 12 January. It's only a very small coronal hole so we have doubts that we are going to experience G1 storm conditions on the 12th but if you are located at a high latitude location this coronal hole might very well be of interest for you.

Header image: NASA SDO.

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.

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Current data suggests there is a slight possibility for aurora to appear at the following high latitude regions in the near future

Arkhangelsk, Norilsk, Vorkuta
The direction of the interplanetary magnetic field is slightly South (-6.24nT).

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