Coronal hole faces Earth

Friday, 27 November 2015 23:11 UTC

It is however very unlikely that we see a strong G3 geomagnetic storm from this coronal hole in the next few days. It is starting to close and shrunk considerably in size during it's two week transit across the far side of the Sun. Click here if you want to know how this coronal hole looked like on 5 October and here on 31 October during the two previous rotations as it faced Earth.

A northern hemisphere polar coronal hole with a southward extension is also facing Earth right now but it might be too far north to influence Earth. It is however likely that the southern hemisphere coronal hole close to the solar equator sends solar wind our way that will arrive at Earth. A minor G1 geomagnetic storm can not be excluded in about 3 days from now (1 or 2 December) when the stream is expect to arrive. 

Image: Two coronal holes are facing Earth as can be seen on this image from NASA SDO.

This is the most exciting news that we've been able to bring you in quite some time as the Sun is very quiet right now. There hasen't even been a C-class solar flare today. None of the sunspot regions currently on the Earth-facing solar disk are complex enough for M or X-class solar flares.

The solar wind is also very slow around 300km/s. The Kp-index is not expect to go above 2 until the coronal hole solar wind stream arrives.