CME tomorrow, coronal hole faces Earth

Wednesday, 12 October 2016 18:35 UTC

CME tomorrow, coronal hole faces Earth

While we are awaiting the arrival of a small coronal mass ejection (expected to arrive tomorrow) our automated alert system notified us of another very interesting solar feature: we have a coronal hole on the Sun and it faces Earth today.

The dark area you see in the image above from SDO is actually an extension of the southern hemisphere polar coronal hole that reaches all the way up to the solar equator. A fast flowing solar wind stream is now on its way to our planet and should arrive either late on Friday (14 October) or perhaps early on Saturday.

Indeed something to look out for apart from the coronal mass ejection! Talking about th incoming coronal mass ejection: note that the NOAA SWPC has a minor G1 geomagnetic storm watch in place for tomorrow and Friday but we do have to keep in mind how slow and faint this plasma cloud is. A long stint of southward IMF (Bz) can of course do a lot but we bet the coronal hole solar wind stream is a more likely candidate to bring us up to possible minor storm conditions. A couple of interesting days are waiting for us. Good luck!

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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