Merry Christmas!

Sunday, 24 December 2017 18:48 UTC

This solar wind comes from a very long and narrow coronal hole that obviously wasn't capable of producing much of a dense shock wave (also known as a Co-rotating Interaction Region) ahead of the high speed solar wind stream. It is usually this shock ahead of the high speed solar wind stream that causes the most geomagnetic instability. A fun fact you might didn't know before.

Remain vigilant nonetheless in the hours ahead, if the direction of the IMF (Bz) turns southward for a while we might still end up with active geomagnetic conditions with a Kp of 4.

That's what we have in store for you here on planet Earth but back on our Sun things are really quiet. Solar activity is very low (A and B class only) despite the presence of one numbered sunspot region on the earth-facing disk. Sunspot region 2692 is however a simple Beta sunspot region which isn't capable of producing C, M or X-class events. We are slowly crawling towards solar minimum.

Now that you're up to date again, we'd like to wish all of our visitors a very Merry Christmas!

Header image provided by Ed Touwen.