Coronal hole faces Earth

Saturday, 16 April 2016 18:06 UTC

Coronal hole faces Earth

A southern extension of the northern hemisphere polar coronal hole is now facing Earth and sending an enhanced solar wind stream towards Earth.

This coronal hole is still located at a fairly high latitude so only limited effects are expected as the solar wind stream is expected to head mostly north of Earth. Last rotation we only managed to reach active geomagnetic conditions (Kp4) and there is no reason to believe we should expect more this time around. This solar wind stream could arrive in two to three days from now and thus mostly be of interest for high latitude sky watchers.

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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