CME impact, M1.5 solar flare

Sunday, 20 September 2015 09:23 UTC

CME impact, M1.5 solar flare

The long duration C-class solar flare coronal mass ejection from two days ago arrived much earlier than expected. A distinct jump in the solar wind and IMF parameters were detected this morning at ACE which can only be the arrival of the 18 September coronal mass ejection.

The solar wind speed jumped to 550km/s but more importantly, the direction of the IMF (Bz) is mostly southward. The direction of the IMF (Bz) has dipped as low as -20nT and the NOAA SWPC reported that the strong G3 geomagnetic storm threshold (Kp7) was reached but the Wing-Kp index hasn't gone beyond Kp6- which stands for moderate G2 geomagnetic stroming conditions. Aurora displays might be visible right now from Victoria and Tasmania in Australia. Most of New Zealand and also the upper United States might also be able to see some aurora. We will post another update for Europe if the conditions remain favourable in the hours ahead.

M-class solar flare

A new sunspot region on the east limb was the source of an M1.5 (R1-minor) solar flare this morning that peaked at 05:03 UTC. There aren't many spots visible just yet so we will not be able to analyse this sunspot region right away but it did recieve a sunspot number: 2420. We will keep an eye on this sunspot region in the days ahead to see how complex it really is.

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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