Merry Christmas!
Sunday, 24 December 2017 18:48 UTC
We are currently under the influence of a coronal hole solar wind stream. The solar wind speed has picked up to 550km/s but there hasn't really been much of a geomagnetic response as the solar wind density and interplanetary magnetic field values have been rather mediocre.
This solar wind comes from a very long and narrow coronal hole that obviously wasn't capable of producing much of a dense shock wave (also known as a Co-rotating Interaction Region) ahead of the high speed solar wind stream. It is usually this shock ahead of the high speed solar wind stream that causes the most geomagnetic instability. A fun fact you might didn't know before.
Remain vigilant nonetheless in the hours ahead, if the direction of the IMF (Bz) turns southward for a while we might still end up with active geomagnetic conditions with a Kp of 4.
That's what we have in store for you here on planet Earth but back on our Sun things are really quiet. Solar activity is very low (A and B class only) despite the presence of one numbered sunspot region on the earth-facing disk. Sunspot region 2692 is however a simple Beta sunspot region which isn't capable of producing C, M or X-class events. We are slowly crawling towards solar minimum.
Now that you're up to date again, we'd like to wish all of our visitors a very Merry Christmas!
Header image provided by Ed Touwen.
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Latest alerts
21:51 UTC - Solar flare
Moderate M1.33 flare from sunspot region 4274
21:36 UTC - Radio Blackout
Minor R1 radio blackout in progress (≥M1 - current: M1.33)
20:30 UTC - Solar flare
Moderate M1.37 flare from sunspot region 4274
20:15 UTC - Radio Blackout
Minor R1 radio blackout in progress (≥M1 - current: M1.37)
X4.0 solar flare
A X4.0 (R3-strong) solar flare peaked at 08:30 UTC this morning. It was of course departing sunspot region 4274 which has been the source of so many solar flares and even geomagnetic storms this past week that provided the fireworks.
Space weather facts
| Last X-flare | 2025/11/14 | X4.0 |
| Last M-flare | 2025/11/14 | M1.3 |
| Last geomagnetic storm | 2025/11/13 | Kp7+ (G3) |
| Spotless days | |
|---|---|
| Last spotless day | 2022/06/08 |
| Monthly mean Sunspot Number | |
|---|---|
| October 2025 | 114.6 -15.2 |
| November 2025 | 100.3 -14.3 |
| Last 30 days | 97.9 -36.5 |