Quiet Sun, Coronal hole faces Earth

Tuesday, 5 July 2016 21:17 UTC

Quiet Sun, Coronal hole faces Earth

Five B-class solar flares. That's the only solar activity the Sun managed to produce last week. We're only two years after solar maximum but the Sun has already gone very quiet as if it approaches solar minimum. Could this be a sign for the years to come? We hope not.

While we are in period with some very quiet space weather, we do have the occasional coronal hole that comes around to face Earth. Today we have such a coronal hole facing Earth and it could spark some high latitude aurora (for those that aren't troubled by the midnight sun) in about two to three days from now when the solar wind stream is expected to arrive at our planet. Active geomagnetic conditions (Kp4) are likely to occur this coming Thursday or Friday and there is a slight chance for minor G1 geomagnetic storm conditions.

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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