Equatorial coronal hole faces Earth

Friday, 26 February 2016 23:42 UTC

Equatorial coronal hole faces Earth

The northern hemisphere polar coronal hole which we hoped would spark some aurora this week never really managed to influence Earth enough for some good auroral displays. The coronal hole was too far north on the solar disk and the most intense part of the solar wind stream went north of our planet. This means that the auroral activity was mostly quiet during the past few days. This could however change in the near future as an equatorial portion of this northern hemisphere polar coronal hole now faces Earth.

This northern hemisphere polar coronal hole really is gigantic but we now know that it never stretched down far enough to lower latitudes where the enhanced solar wind flow could reach Earth. The most intense solar wind stream went too far north of our planet to really affect us. Fear not as the geomagnetic conditions at our planet will likely increase in about three days from now as we now have an equatorial portion of this polar coronal hole facing Earth. Because this part of the coronal hole stretches all the way to the equator, we can pretty much guarantee that we will see an enhanced solar wind enviroment around our planet in about three days from now. Instead of blowing out solar wind that goes north of our planet, this portion of the coronal hole is expelling high speed solar wind right at our planet. We expect a brief window where we could reach active (Kp4) geomagnetic conditions once the solar wind stream arrives in about three days from now. High latitude sky watchers should be alert for enhanced auroral displays when the solar wind stream arrives.

Image: the coronal hole as seen by NASA SDO on 26 February, 23:30 UTC.

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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