Coronal hole faces Earth

Monday, 28 January 2019 20:10 UTC

Coronal hole faces Earth

A coronal hole is facing our planet today and sending a high speed solar wind stream towards our planet.

Our automated coronal hole detection system did its job and detected the coronal hole. An alert was send to the mobile app and our Twitter account:

Compared to the previous rotation we see that this coronal hole changed a fair bit. It became a bit less cohesive but overall it has increased slightly in size. It is now also connected with the southern hemisphere polar coronal hole.

During the previous rotation this coronal hole caused one 3-hour period with minor G1 geomagentic storm conditions. It is likely that we will see similar solar wind conditions and geomagnetic effects this time around. We expect a co-rotating interaction region ahead of the solar wind stream to arrive on 31 January. This co-rotating interaction region will be followed by the onset of the high speed solar wind stream with solar wind speeds expected of about 600km/s. Active geomagnetic conditions are likely with a chance of minor G1 geomagnetic storm conditions both on 31 January and 1 February.

Unsure what all of this means? Check out our help article detailing all you need to know about coronal holes!

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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