Surprise M1.3 solar flare

Sunday, 7 August 2016 15:51 UTC

Surprise M1.3 solar flare

Solar activity increased surprisingly to moderate levels today thanks to an M1.3 (R1-minor) solar flare that took place at the NE limb.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is still having issues with its AIA instrument so we will have to rely on secondary sources like PROBA2 or one of the GOES satellites for the time being. Using GOES-15 imagery, it looks like this M-class event (which was closely followed by an C8.5 solar flare) came from a sunspot region on the north-east limb. This is likely the return of sunspot region 2567 which produced seven M-class solar flares during the last solar rotation. Are we in for two weeks of enhanced solar activity. Lets hope so!

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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