Coronal hole faces Earth

Saturday, 20 April 2019 18:02 UTC

Coronal hole faces Earth

Space weather has been very quiet lately with not much interesting to report on. There haven't been any sunspot regions or solar eruptions worth mentioning and also here on Earth we've been having quiet geomagnetic conditions. This could however change in the near future as we have a southern hemisphere coronal hole facing our planet today. Those of you who follow us on Twitter or have the SpaceWeatherLive iOS/Android app have likely seen the automated coronal hole detection alert.

This is a familiar coronal hole that faced our planet last rotation as well but it did not change much during the past 4 weeks. It perhaps slightly increased in size but nothing to write home about. Solar wind flowing from this coronal hole could arrive at our planet on Tuesday which would be 23 April. We do not expect a lot of geomagnetic unrest from this solar wind stream due to the limited size of this coronal hole but high latitude sky watchers who have dark enough skies should be alert for possible aurora displays but anything beyond Kp3 is unlikely.

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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