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We are constantly improving this website to make it more complete than ever. This topic keeps a track of the changes that have been made to the website so you can easily track what's new on SpaceWeatherLive.

Initially this topic started in our native language forum in 2007, so if you would like to know what's been added the last years, please brows our Dutch Support forum.


Today we made some big changes to SpaceWeatherLive, although it was more on the background, it is visible somewhere ;-). Let's start with an updated help article about the Low, Middle and High latitudes. We developed several new charts to make it more clear where those area's are, based on the magnetic latitude. Please be aware that the German and French help section is not yet translated, please help us out with that section!

Second, and biggest change is the page "Kp indices as  a global aurora indicator". This page gives you a representation of the location of the auroral oval on the "ideal timing", with this we mean the maximal expansion of the auroral oval un function of the Kp indices and solar noon. The whole calculation method has been changed and is more base now on measurements by satellites. Also, it marks the location of the auroral oval, so keep in mind that you can see the aurora up to 6 degrees equatorward. We also changed the world map to represent a more nightly situation.


Feedback is always welcome, don't hesitate to contact us! If you would like to volunteer as moderator, translator etcetera, you're welcome!

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This weekend we did some improvements to the site, most of the changes happened under the hood (including cache improvements, debugged archive and extended chaco on the input parameters). Most notable change is in the menu bar when you browse our site on a mobile phone; until yesterday when you opened the menu it would expand and show all the items, this made you scroll much and is not very friendly. So it's updated so it's easier to navigate around.

We got contacted for a Spanish translation, we did not receive any feedback from that user but we do hope we can provide this as an other language. Also SpaceWeatherLive team member Marcel is working on a Swedish translation.

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  • 1 month later...

If something exciting happened we will place announcements on the main website to inform you about this. The announcements can range from big solar flares, activity updates and aurora alerts. It will be displayed among all pages so you'll always know if we have an announcement about the space weather.

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We always do our best to keep improving our website and yesterday we worked hard to redesign the Sunspot regions page. It was already a long time on our todo list bit we didn't get to it due to our limited time resources. We have also improved our algorithm for the sunspot numbers on the images. So, what has changed?

  • Bigger images, not only the top image but also those of the sunspot regions, this will make all better visible
  • The top image is not only bigger but the numbered regions are hotlinks to the detailed info below so when there are plenty of regions visible, this is a fast way to quickly go to the information about that spot
  • The lay-out of the page is vastly improved and now optimized for mobile usage
http://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity/sunspot-regions
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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

We introduced a new type of alert on our Twitter channel @_SpaceWeather_ which notifies you automatically when a radio blackout is in progress. Radio blackouts are associated with strong solar flares. This way you will be notified before the flare reaches it's peak and you can follow the solar flare live on the website. Of course we continue to update our Facebook page when a solar flare has peaked but with this Twitter feature you can truly follow the action live.

There are five alert levels:

R1 for when the X-ray flux reaches M1.

R2 for when the X-ray flux reaches M5.

R3 for when the X-ray flux reaches X1.

R4 for when the X-ray flux reaches X10.

R5 for when the X-ray flux reaches X20.

Follow our Twitter channel to receive all these live alerts through Twitter and activate the option to receive push alerts on your smartphone by using the Twitter app so you will never miss a thing! https://twitter.com/_SpaceWeather_

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Today we present our newly improved archive! We already had this archive for a long time but it has been improved with some great new features.

Ever wondered how the sun looked like during a certain period? Which group was responsible for that strong solar flare? Wonder no more: you can find that out in the new archive, in more detail then every before. For every day since October 2001 we got imagery of how the sun looked like and since 2000 we got activity reports, solar flare, proton and KP charts.

Since March of this year we also store imagery of every sunspot region both of SDO HMI magnetogram and intensitygram imagery so you see perfectly how a region looked like during a specific day. It also includes it's location, number of sun spots and other details. It can all be found on the ''Sunspot regions'' page.

Another great improvement has been made there where you could always see the X-ray charts. The past 13 years you could already view the X-ray graphs of any day since 2000 but it was never possible to tell where a certain flare originated from, what the exact strength of the flare was and the exact time that it occurred. That is now also a thing of the past. The X-ray graph pages received a major overhaul and with pride we can tell that for the past 13 years, we listed every single B, C, M and X-class solar flare complete with location, peak strength, start- peak- & end time! But that's not all: we also got videos of every X-class flare of SC24 and every X-class flare from SC23 that reached X3.0 or stronger!

So take a look at the archive and experience again those Super X-class solar flares which caused the 2003 Halloween storm, the four X-flares from May 2013 or any other event that might interest you. Visit the archive!

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  • 2 weeks later...

We are happy to announce some more features:

1. Live tweets now with images

We expanded the automatic alert system with the the ability to send images. Those of you who follow us on Twitter will have noticed that an image came with the tweet of the SDO/EVE pinhole camera so you right away see where an eruption took place. Other alerts will also be send with an image. Link to Twitter: https://twitter.com/_SpaceWeather_

2. Returning regions

Until now you had to guess when a region might return after transiting the far side. From now on we update the returning regions so you are always up to date if there is a chance for a region to return back on to the visible disk. Especially with very active regions it's handy to compare them with the previous carrington rotation.

3. H-alpha areas without spots

There are also areas without any spots, these can be regions that have decayed to areas with only facuale. These regions had a number but there is not much to see of them anymore. If you look with a H-alpha telescope you will still see a bright area where the faculae is present. Te recognize those we will update these every day as well. See above image.

4. Sunspot groups from the past and their characteristics

We already expanded the SpaceWeatherLive archive some time ago with every eruption of the 23th and 24th SolarCycle but now also the sunspot group information and imagery of the disk have been completed. You can find imagery of the solar disk of every single day since the start of SC23 in June 1996. There is only a few weeks worth of imagery missing, mainly because of SOHO problems in 1998. For every single day since June 1996 there will also be a list with sunspot groups, their characteristics and the eruptions it produced. Link to the archive: http://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/archive/

http://www.spaceweatherlive.com/community/uploads/monthly_06_2013/post-94-0-58364400-1372433504.pnghttp://www.spaceweatherlive.com/community/uploads/monthly_06_2013/post-94-0-62022300-1372433506.png

If there are any more suggestions then you are more then welcome to put them on the SpaceWeatherLive forums!

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  • 3 weeks later...

Events on the sun today:

We have yet again a very exciting website update for you. We now list solar flares that occurred on the sun today. A list that updates regularly with events that occurred on the sun for the current day. This list can be found on the ''Real-time solar activity'' page and replaces the list that showed the events from yesterday. If you wan't to find out what happened yesterday then press the new ''More events in the archive'' button which brings you to our extensive archive.

The list with events will be updated every 30 minutes and is sorted by time. It shows the region, flare strength, start- max- and end time of a flare. If you click on the region number, you will be taken to our ''Sunspot regions'' page, where you can see the group that produced the flare in detail. The ''Sunspot regions'' page is updated every hour with new images. The flares that occurred today will also appear on the ''Sunspot regions'' page.



Real-time solar activity page: http://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity
Sunspot regions page: http://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity/sunspot-regions
Archive: http://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/archive

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Solarwind Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA)

We just made a small update to the graphs on the website. The graphs which show the solarwind and Interplanetary Magnetic Field data as measured by the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) satellite now show how long it takes for the solarwind to travel the distance between ACE and earth.

 

 

A bit of background information: The data these graphics show are being measured at Lagrangian point 1. This is a point between the sun and earth, where the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft is located. The L1 point is about 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth and it takes the solarwind some time to travel the gap. How long it takes for the solarwind to travel from L1 to Earth is now showed on the graphs.

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New language: Spanish.

A todos los visitantes hispanohablantes de SpaceWeatherLive: Tenemos una gran noticia para usted! A partir de ahora el sitio web SpaceWeatherLive está disponible en español gracias a Jose Juan.

For our international users:

We are proud to present our 5th language on the SpaceWeatherLive website. Thanks to José Juan Ramòn from Spain who provided the Spanish translation. You can always switch between languages in the upper right corner of the website.

Would you also like to see the website in your language? It's possible and not too difficult. Just contact us for more information.

 

In other news...

We did some modifications in our coding, mostly under the hood but one that you'll start seeing as from today: The IMF warnings on the website will also show up when the strength of the IMF is moderate. (15nT.)

Sidenote: we started also a beta test of something, an improvement of an existing feature. Once it's tested with real-time data we'll mark it as stable.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Again some new updates on the website. We introduced some UI tweaks on the solar images pages and also the forum module received an overhaul. The values under the graphs received also a slight visual update

New on the site is that you can also view the latest image from GOES-15 SXI. A button under the SDO/EVE SAM pinhole will bring you to the latest GOES-15 SXI image.

We also introduce a new help article! This time you can learn a bit more about the SDO/SAM EVE images. These images are ideal to determine the location of a solar flare. What do we see on them and how can we interpret them? Learn everything you need to know by reading the article. The article can be found in the help section and there is also a button under the SDO/SAM EVE image that takes you to the article. Read it here.

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  • 3 weeks later...

For our high latitude visitors we have some great news! From now on we'll also be alerting for minor geomagnetic storming conditions (Kp5)! We've rewritten the alert to make this happen and in a more flexible way so you'll get extra warnings if a geomagnetic storm gets stronger (Kp6, Kp7, ...). The G1 Minor geomagnetic storm alert will only be transmitted through the SpaceWeatherLive Twitter channel and not by e-mail because mailservers may see a bunch e-mails and will mark them as spam.

We advice you to follow us on Twitter for live alerts and if you have a smartphone with the Twitter app, you can also enable push alerts so you'll get the alert right as it happens on your smartphone! Additional content can always be found on Google+, Facebook, YouTube and of course on the SpaceWeatherLive forum.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Improved Kp-index article
Space weather is quiet and that gives us time to work on the site. Today we present our improved Kp-index article.

We go more into detail then ever before and also give attention to NOAA's geomagnetic storm (G) scale which you will often hear about during geomagnetic storms. We also provide a list of large places, with an indicator as to what Kp-value these places need to see aurora under good conditions.

To read it please follow this link: http://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/help/the-kp-index

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New language: Swedish.

Heja Sverige! I dag presenterar vi vår sjätte språk på SpaceWeatherLive! Svenska!

Today we launch our sixth language on SpaceWeatherLive: Swedish! You can always switch between languages in the upper right corner of the website. Would you also like to see the website in your language? It's possible and not too difficult. Just contact us for more information.

Note that this language is still in a beta phase so errors in the translation are likely. We are looking for someone who would like to check our Swedish translation. Is your native language Swedish then please contact us!

Visit the Swedish version of SpaceWeatherLive on: http://www.spaceweatherlive.com/sv

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Top 50 solar flares
This year we already introduced introduced our upgraded archive in which you could find the more than 30.000 solar flares that occured since June 1996 together with detailed info and graphs. With the help of this impressive database, it's time to introduce another addition: the top 50 solar flares!

This new page will bring up a handy list of the most powerful solar flares since June 1996 with a direct link to the archive where you can find additional information. We also got a video of most of the solar flares so you can experience all those flares once again from the comfort of your chair. As extra addition there is also a list of strongest solar flares for both this Solar Cycle (SC24) as the previous Solar Cycle, SC23.

Click here to view the top 50 flares list: http://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity/top-50-solar-flares

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Website update: Flare facts!
Today we present yet another update on SpaceWeatherLive. This time a new module: Flare facts. This module (you can find it on the right hand side on every page except on the forums and you might have to scroll down a bit) will show some fun facts about the history of solar flares.



First it shows when the last M and X-flare occurred and also what strength that flare was. Below that you will find a ''This day in history'' list with the top 5 strongest solar flares that occurred on the current day in history since 1996, sorted by strength of course.

Every date is a hyperlink which brings you to that date in the archive. There you can find more information about the eruption and many other things.

This module is updated every day with fresh data so keep checking back!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Improved module: Space weather facts!
Today we present yet another update on SpaceWeatherLive. This time we improved a recently introduced module. Flare facts will now be known as space weather facts! This module (you can find it on the right hand side on every page except on the forums and you might have to scroll down a bit) will show some fun facts about the current day in history. It already showed when the last M and X-class solar flares occurred. Also showed were the top 5 strongest solar flares that occurred on the current day in history.
 


What was added?
We now also show historic facts about geomagnetic conditions. It will show when the last geomagnetic storm occurred and the strongest measured Kp-value was on that day. We also added a top 5 list of the strongest measured Kp-value of the current day in history. All the dates are hyperlinks to that day in our archive. Like usual, this module is automatically updated every day. We hope you enjoy this new feature!

Archive addition
A small addition in the archive: the Kp values of every day can now also be found in a table below the Kp-values charts.



http://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/archive/2003/10/29/kp

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We would like to apologize us for sending multiple CME impact mails. Only the first one was correct. We are investigating what went wrong in our engine and will evaluate and fix it. For now impact alerts are only send through Twitter so you don't get a flood of e-mails. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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  • 1 month later...

Time for some updates! Some of which you already saw active in the past week some new from today:

  • Refactored warning blocks on the website, it's now more optimized for higher latitudes so notifications of certain data from ACE is better. Warnings appear when the Bz reaches -5 or lower and are now color coded depending on how low the Bz is at the moment.
  • Optimized daily NOAA reports of solar activity and sunspot report. As you might know we enhance the reports of NOAA for better readability, now we took it a step further and made it a bit prettier. This is also the case for all the activity reports in our archive.
  • Top flare lists data formatting is now depending on the language.
  • Video's have been added from the latest X-class flares.
  • Some nasty bugs that were found have been solved.
  • Template changes to newer version and refactored main style.
  • Updated SWL alert page to better show what alerts get send and through which channel they are provided
  • Added extra check to storm alerts and added one for active conditions (Kp4) to alert our high latitude visitors. This alert get's send over our Twitter channel.
As always we continue to provide updates and improvements to the website to give you the best experience. If you have any suggestions we love to hear them!
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  • 1 month later...

The impact alert has had a great test yesterday. This feature was brought back to beta stadium due to some false positives so the impact of yesterday was tested with our fixes to the alert and was found to be successful. We will wait for two more CME impact tests before activating the e-mail alert for this feature. Impact alerts are send out in beta to our Twitter channel.

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Some improvements have been made to the Kp graph and data display. Some other code optimization has been done too.

In beta phase is a new Twitter alert, hopefully you'll see the first of those tweets soon. Once beta phase is completed, it won't be converted to an e-mail alert. So if you have a smartphone, install the twitter app and subscribe on our channel to receive push alerts and you'll get all of our alerts immediately on your smartphone without paying a penny (depends on your mobile carrier data plan that can charge for it but our service is free)

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Guest Harry Twinotter

Interesting use of the "lead-time" data from ACE in the Wing KP model. With this fast solar wind, we should be able to see how it works out in practice soon.

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Our beta alert test was successful, unleashing two of them in the early hours of January 14th. The new predicted Kp index alert is only sent when a storm onset is happening starting from Kp4, if the prediction leads to stronger storming new ones will be tweeted. If the storm subsides or loses strength it won't be sending out new ones. We do not want to give you a flash flood of notifications on your smartphone too. So we provide early warnings if a stronger predicted Kp-index occurs so that you should be alert and follow the further events on our website.

There is also a new page coming and and updated one. We'll let you know when it's available.

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