Coronal hole stream, NOAA service interruption, filament eruption

Friday, 12 December 2014 20:58 UTC

Coronal hole stream arrival

Geomagnetic conditions are elevated in response to the arrival of a coronal hole high speed stream. The solar wind speed lies around the 600km/s which is high. The direction of the IMF fluctuated wildly over the past hours and this caused a period of minor G1 geomagnetic storm conditions.

Aurora displays are already being reported from high latitude locations like northern Norway. The image below was taken only a few hours ago by andershanssen.com. Amazing!

High latitude sky watchers should remain alert for auroral outbreaks as coronal hole effects will likely continue in the days ahead.

NOAA SWPC service interruption

The NOAA SWPC announced that tomorrow (Saturday 13 December) SWPC operations will be temporarily suspended due to facility power system maintenance. This is what the NOAA SWPC (click to expand) states on their website:

What this means for us is that some features on SpaceWeatherLive which rely on data from the NOAA SWPC will be unavailable for the duration of the power outage. The outage window ranges from 12:00 UTC on Saturday till 01:00 UTC on Sunday.

Filament eruption

The filament channel that we pointed out yesterday which was located between two coronal holes erupted this night in spectacular fashion. A large amount of solar plasma was hurled into space but the resulting coronal mass ejection was launched well north of the Sun-Earth line and does not have an earth-directed component.

Images: Anna McGee, NASA SDO, NASA/ESA SOHO and andershanssen.com
Video: NASA SDO.