Coronal hole faces Earth
Monday, 5 December 2016 20:41 UTC
Sunspot region 2615 never really got going again after the two M-class events on 29 November. The sunspot region grew in size the past few days but never regained the magnetic complexity needed for M-class events. A shame as a nice earth-directed coronal mass ejection would have been very welcome during these quiet times. That means we shift our attention to coronal holes once more and guess what... we have a large coronal hole facing our planet today!
Our automated coronal hole detection system detected the coronal hole and sent a tweet to our Twitter account @_spaceweather_ this morning:
A coronal hole is facing Earth. Enhanced solar wind could arrive in ~3 days - Follow live on https://t.co/T1Jkf6i4Cb pic.twitter.com/cMu3mf9lZa
— SpaceWeatherLive (@_SpaceWeather_) 5 december 2016
As you can see it is a very large northward extension of the southern hemisphere polar coronal hole. It is indeed a pretty large opening that extends all the way to the solar equator so we should see a very decent solar wind stream impact at our planet in 2 to 3 days (7 or 8 December) from now. Minor G1 geomagnetic storm conditions are likely and an isolated period where we reach moderate G2 geomagnetic storm conditions should not be excluded.
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