Coronal hole faces Earth

Saturday, 17 December 2016 16:13 UTC

Coronal hole faces Earth

Its starting to become a familiar topic here: coronal holes! The northern hemisphere polar coronal hole is back and sending an enhanced stream of solar wind towards our planet.

Compared to the last rotation, we see that the coronal hole did not change all that much but the equatorial part and the part that is just south of the equator that is facing Earth now does look a little bit bigger than it was during the last rotation. You could actually say that these are two seperate coronal holes as the two areas are hardly connected anymore but for now we will refer to this solar feature as one coronal hole.

We should start to feel the effects of this coronal hole in about 24 to 48 hours from now and the stream could increase in strength in about 3 days as the equatorial part that should be more geoeffective faces us today. Storming up to the minor G1 geomagnetic storm level is possible next week once the solar wind stream arrives.

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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