Coronal hole faces Earth, DSCOVR glitches

Monday, 28 August 2017 18:49 UTC

The solar wind flowing from this coronal hole is expected to reach our planet in about 48 to 72 hours from now and is likely to cause enhanced auroral conditions on 31 August.

A coronal hole is facing Earth. Enhanced solar wind could arrive in ~3 days - Follow live on https://t.co/T1Jkf6i4Cb pic.twitter.com/VfLOyDZ7qd

— SpaceWeatherLive (@_SpaceWeather_) August 28, 2017

DSCOVR glitches

A word of caution for those who keep an eye on the solar wind data from DSCOVR: The past 24 hours or so we saw a lot of crazy solar wind values where the speed suddenly reached 500km/s or even above 800km/s.

This is a known issue with DSCOVR when the solar wind is slow and the solar wind density becomes very low. The spacecraft starts to track signal noise and mistakenly reports this as high solar wind speeds. So be careful when you watch DSCOVR and see these kind of high solar wind speed values. They could be false!

A great tip is to check the data from ACE as well because ACE normally doesn't suffer from these kind of issues! The main data on our site comes from DSCOVR but there are drop down buttons with ACE and SOHO data as well! You can find the data on this page.