Coronal hole faces Earth, Quiet Sun

Friday, 8 December 2017 18:38 UTC

Coronal hole faces Earth, Quiet Sun

Today we have yet another southward extension of the northern hemisphere polar coronal hole facing our planet.

This coronal hole is well connected with Earth and it resulted in minor G1 geomagnetic storm conditions only a few days ago.  This extension is however much smaller than the one that faced us on 2 December so we do not expect geomagnetic storm conditions this time around but a slight increase in the solar wind conditions at Earth will be possible on 11 December. Something to keep an eye on if you are an aurora watcher at a high latitude location. If you are a solar enthusiast you are however really out of luck. The Sun has been very quiet for weeks now with mostly A and B-class activity. We have a numbered sunspot region on the disk (sunspot region 2690) today but this group has already decayed and is now spotless. Solar activity is expected to remain very low in the foreseeable future. It really does feel like we are well on our way to solar minimum...

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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