Coronal hole faces Earth

Wednesday, 7 November 2018 19:08 UTC

Coronal hole faces Earth

A fairly large but patchy coronal hole is facing our planet today.

This coronal hole has been around for a little while now and if we compare this coronal hole with how it looked like during the previous rotation we can conclude that it actually increased in size. It remains rather patchy/poorly defined which we can see on the SDO AIA images at a wavelength of 193 Ångström.

A high speed solar wind stream flowing from this coronal hole is expected to arrive at Earth late on 9 November. During the previous rotation this coronal hole caused active geomagnetic conditions (Kp4) but considering that this coronal hole increased in size it isn't impossible that we might reach minor G1 geomagnetic storm conditions this time around. The NOAA SWPC seems to agree and issued a minor G1 geomagnetic storm watch for this Friday (9 November) and Saturday (10 November).

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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