Coronal hole faces Earth
Tuesday, 17 April 2018 13:57 UTC
Solar activity has been pretty boring lately with no solar flares or sunspot regions really worth mentioning. A tiny region with a reverse magnetic polarity did appear a few days ago which likely belonged to the next solar cycle but it faded away pretty quickly. It is normal for sunspot regions from two solar cycles to overlap around solar minimum but it does show we are closing in on true solar minimum. This combined with the fact that we are hardly seeing any sunspots or flaring activity at the moment means this solar cycle might be a shorter than average cycle.
With that interesting fact out of the way, let's focus on the here and now! Here and now on the Sun we have a southern hemisphere coronal hole facing our planet! This coronal hole isn't new and has been around for a while in all shapes and sizes. During the previous rotation it caused active geomagnetic conditions and nice auroral displays at high latitudes. Expect an enhanced solar wind stream from this coronal hole to arrive this Thursday, 19 April. Like the previous rotation, active geomagnetic conditions (Kp4) are to be expected.
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