CME impact, northward Bz

Wednesday, 20 July 2016 17:29 UTC

CME impact, northward Bz

A shock in the solar wind was observed by ACE, yesterday around 23:00 UTC. This is likely the expected coronal mass ejection of a C1 solar flare that took place on 17 July.

The solar plasma cloud arrived much earlier than expected, which suggests that the coronal mass ejection was either much faster than originally thought or there might be some influences of a coronal hole solar wind stream at play as well.

Either way, the magnetic cloud sparked a minor G1 geomagnetic storm earlier today when the north-south direction of the IMF (Bz) dipped as low as -28.28nT. Since then, the Bz has been stuck in a northward direction and no more geomagnetic storming was observed. The Bz remains northward at the time of writing and as the conditions are now, no more geomagnetic storming should be expected.

Despite the short duration of the geomagnetic storm, there were enough photographers around the world who caught a glimpse of the show. One of those people is Paul Zizka from Canada who took this fantastic image of the aurora and even captured some noctilucent clouds! Fantastic!

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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