Two small coronal holes faces Earth

Tuesday, 24 May 2016 18:10 UTC

Two small coronal holes faces Earth

Solar activity remains at low levels as we only have one numbered sunspot region on the Earth-facing solar disk. Most of the geomagnetic activity at Earth thus has to come from coronal holes and today we have yet another coronal hole facing our planet.

It's actually not one, but two smaller coronal holes that face Earth. We should start to feel the effects of their coronal hole solar wind streams in about 2 to 3 days from and a Kp of 4 (active geomagnetic conditions) can be expected. Sky watchers in Tasmania (Australia) and perhaps around the US-Canadian border should be alert for aurora when the solar wind stream arrives.

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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