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Coronal hole faces Earth

Sunday, 15 January 2017 21:41 UTC

Coronal hole faces Earth

The northern hemisphere polar coronal hole with an extension all the way down to the solar equator is back and sending an enhanced stream of solar wind towards our planet.

This coronal hole is a familiar solar feature that survived countless of solar rotations but if we compare the current coronal hole with how it looked like during the last rotation, we do have to conclude that it shrunk quite a bit. It managed to cause a moderate G2 geomagnetic storm during the last rotation but its doubtful that we will reach G2 storm conditions during this rotation.

We should start to feel the effects of this coronal hole solar wind stream at our planet in about 48 to 72 hours from now. Storming up to the minor G1 geomagnetic storm level is possible on 18 January (Wednesday) according to the NOAA SWPC who issued a storm watch for that date.

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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