Coronal hole faces Earth
Sunday, 28 April 2019 11:38 UTC
Aurora season is now rapidly coming to an end for high latitude sky watchers in the northern hemisphere but the night skies for our friends in the southern hemisphere are only getting darker and darker. Good news for you as we have a coronal hole facing our planet today which is sending a high speed solar wind stream towards our planet.
A southern hemisphere coronal hole is facing Earth. Enhanced solar wind could arrive in ~3 days. Follow live on https://t.co/bsXLidnzGh pic.twitter.com/stRi9EdfM6
— SpaceWeatherLive (@_SpaceWeather_) April 28, 2019
When this solar wind stream passed STEREO Ahead on 24 April we saw solar wind speeds over 600km/s and a maximum total strength of the interplanetary magnetic field of around 15nT . The southward component of the IMF (Bz) reached almost -10nT for a short moment. We also see that the coronal hole slightly increased in size compared to the previous rotation which is good news as we only barely reached Kp4- for one 3-hour period back on 4 April. For this rotation we expect at most active geomagnetic conditions (Kp4) when the solar wind arrives which could be this Tuesday (30 April) or Wednesday (1 May).
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