Where are the X-flares? Site improvements

Thursday, 5 May 2016 10:07 UTC

That means it's been a full year since we've last seen an X-class solar flare. While such long periods without an X-class solar flare aren't uncommon, it does show how weak the current solar cycle is. We are now two years past solar maximum and solar cycle 23 was still producing regular X-class activity two years after solar maximum. As a matter of fact, the Sun produced 20 (!) X-class solar flares in 2003, which was two years after solar maximum of solar cycle 23. Three (1, 2, 3) of those solar flares were ''Super X-class solar flares'' that peaked at X10 or even higher. Fun fact... or well... maybe not such a fun fact: the current solar cycle has yet to produce a solar flare that strong. X6.9 is the strongest solar flare of this solar cycle thus far.

What do you think? When will we see the next X-class solar flare and will solar cycle 24 surprise us one day and show us an X10+ flare?

Website improvements

We've also been hard at work to improve our website. Let's start with the archive. We are now storing the ACE solar wind and IMF data every day (example) and are hard at work to replace the NOAA solar flare and proton graphs with our own graphs in the archive. We are still hard at work to fill in any missing data so there might be a few periods that we are still working on.

Last but not least we now also have 24 hour plots of the solar wind/IMF data and solar flare data. Be sure to check out these pages here and here. You can even zoom in one these graphs by clicking on the graph and selecting the time period you wish to view. We hope you enjoy these improvements!