Small coronal hole faces Earth

Saturday, 10 June 2017 09:08 UTC

Our coronal hole detector did pick up a small coronal hole facing our planet today. While this coronal hole is not large, it is at least something worth to keep an eye on if you are a high latitude sky watcher that isn't plagued by the midnight sun.

A coronal hole is facing Earth. Enhanced solar wind could arrive in ~3 days - Follow live on https://t.co/T1Jkf6i4Cb pic.twitter.com/HDU6vvZPNp

— SpaceWeatherLive (@_SpaceWeather_) June 10, 2017

This coronal hole are actually more the remains of what used to be a much larger coronal hole. This is indeed a coronal hole that is in the process of closing up. If we compare it with how it looked like during the last rotation we can clearly see how it shrunk in size. Some smaller open areas remain if we look at the SDO imagery now so we'd be more correct if we spoke of multiple smaller openings but for the sake of simplicity we will refer to this feature as one coronal hole.

It is hard to say what kind of geomagnetic activity we can get from such small openings but it will likely not be anything major. In two to three days from now we might see an uptick in geomagnetic activity if there is a clear solar wind stream arrival but geomagnetic storm conditions (Kp5 or higher) seems unlikely. Nonetheless for the die hards out there who can not stand these quiet times, this could be something worth keeping in mind for the upcoming days.