Coronal hole, Aurora forecast page

Saturday, 25 February 2017 22:04 UTC

A coronal hole is facing Earth. Enhanced solar wind could arrive in ~3 days - Follow live on https://t.co/T1Jkf6i4Cb pic.twitter.com/FNVIV8bRkr

— SpaceWeatherLive (@_SpaceWeather_) February 25, 2017

It is a trans-equatorial extension of the southern hemisphere polar coronal hole that is facing our planet today. This coronal hole is a familiar solar feature as it has been around for months, surviving multiple solar rotations. If we compare the current coronal hole with how it looked like during the previous solar rotation, we see it has shrunk a bit in size. It remains a fairly large coronal hole so we should still see some decent geomagnetic activity from it. In fact, it did manage to bring us multiple 3-hour periods where we reached the minor G1 geomagnetic storm threshold during the previous rotation and there is absolutely reason to believe that this could happen again in the coming days. The solar wind stream is expected to arrive in about 48 to 72 hours from now so we issue a minor G1 geomagnetic storm watch for 28 February 2017. Be sure to follow us on Facebook for additional updates and follow us on Twitter for our space weather alerts!

Aurora forecast page

For those of you who haven't noticed yet: a little while ago, we changed the aurora forecast page. The predicted 3-hour Kp-indices and the predicted 3-hour K-indices for the high and middle latitudes are now displayed as an interactive graph.

The Wang-Sheeley-Arge Model got axed and instead we opted to display the easier to understand long term Kp-forecast from the NOAA SWPC that gives a rough overview for the expected activity for the next 27 days. While space weather is very hard to forecast so far in advance, it does give as a good idea when reliable recurrent solar features like coronal hole solar wind streams are set to return.

Go check it out here!