CME impact, northward Bz

Wednesday, 20 July 2016 17:29 UTC

The solar plasma cloud arrived much earlier than expected, which suggests that the coronal mass ejection was either much faster than originally thought or there might be some influences of a coronal hole solar wind stream at play as well.

Either way, the magnetic cloud sparked a minor G1 geomagnetic storm earlier today when the north-south direction of the IMF (Bz) dipped as low as -28.28nT. Since then, the Bz has been stuck in a northward direction and no more geomagnetic storming was observed. The Bz remains northward at the time of writing and as the conditions are now, no more geomagnetic storming should be expected.

Despite the short duration of the geomagnetic storm, there were enough photographers around the world who caught a glimpse of the show. One of those people is Paul Zizka from Canada who took this fantastic image of the aurora and even captured some noctilucent clouds! Fantastic!