A stormy start to September

Tuesday, 6 September 2016 18:56 UTC

A stormy start to September

It has been five crazy first days of this month as every single day thus far provided us with at least one 3-hour period where we reached geomagnetic storm conditions according to the NOAA SWPC. The first three days of this month even treated us with moderate G2 geomagnetic storming conditions. This was all thanks to a massive coronal hole system that has now started to rotate out of Earth's view. The solar wind stream has been diminishing in strength during the past hours and today will likely be the first day of this month that we will not reach the minor G1 geomagnetic storm level.

As a lot of you have found out with your own eyes, geomagnetic storms equal a lot of aurora! We've seen an incredible ammount of fantastic images and videos all made the past few days from all over the world. From Tasmania and Antarctica down under to the United States and even the Netherlands! Here comes a small selection of the work that we stumbled upon during the past few days:


#teamtanner (Alberta, Canada)

Robin Eriksson Franzén (Kalix, Sweden)



Julien Johnston (Tasmania, Australia)

One of the few places in the world that weren't so lucky the past few days was Troon in Scotland. Hats off to MJS Ferrier Photography for trying anyway:


Header image: Marcel de Bont Photography (Kiruna, Sweden)

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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