Coronal hole faces Earth

Monday, 5 October 2015 15:31 UTC

Coronal hole faces Earth

A trans equatorial coronal is facing Earth right now. Solar wind flowing from this coronal hole could arrive in two to three days from now and we will likely see at least minor G1 geomagnetic storming conditions when the solar wind stream arrives.

Twitter

Speaking of coronal holes: we are very proud to present a new and unique feature for our automated Twitter alerts. We are now able to automatically detect coronal holes.

We know that many of you follow our Twitter account and appreciate the automated alerts that our server posts whenever there is a significant space weather event. We already had a ton of different alerts for you such as radio blackout alerts, solar flare alerts, Kp alerts and much more, all without any human intervention. Even when we are asleep, our server makes sure you are up to date with the latest space weather alerts.

There was however one alert missing that we really wanted to have. Something which we were unable to alert you about without the intervention of our keyboards: coronal holes. This is now a thing of the past.

Our webmaster worked very hard to realize an automatic coronal hole detection system. With this unique feature, we are now able to send automated alerts as soon as a coronal hole rotates into an earth-facing position. A very exciting new feature we think! We do have to note that this new alert is still in a beta phase meaning we will test and evaluate it in the coming weeks. We did our best to make this system as watertight as possible and hope that there won't be any false alerts.

Yesterday it detected it's first coronal hole with flying colors so go check it out! Our first automated coronal hole alert can now be found on Twitter. Be sure to follow us while you're at it on @_Spaceweather_

Some other Twitter news that we want to mention: we also made some minor changes to the Kp alerts. The observed Kp index alerts will now show up with a fancy aurora image (we have 17 in total from Kp4- all the way to Kp9) from now on and the predicted Kp tweets will show up with an image of the predicted auroral oval.

We hope you are just as excited with these changes as we are!

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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