Double coronal holes face Earth

Wednesday, 29 January 2025 15:19 UTC

You could actually make the argument there are two coronal holes facing our planet! One on the northern hemsiphere and one on the Sun's southern hemisphere. However, the coronal hole located on the Sun's northern hemisphere is by far the biggest of the two and should be the main driver of the geomagnetic activity that is expected.

Solar wind flowing from this coronal hole could start to influence the geomagnetic conditions on our planet as early as Friday, 31 January with activity ramping up into Saturday, 1 February. Expect enhanced geomagnetic conditions when the solar wind stream arrives with Kp-values between 4 (active geomagnetic conditions) to 5 which would be a minor G1 geomagnetic storm.

When it comes to solar flares and sunspot regions things are sort of quiet. There are no noteworthy sunspot regions currently on the solar disk. There is a cluster of sunspot regions on the north-east quadrant of the Sun (3976, 3977 and 3978) which show some development but there is only a low chance (less than 30% chance) of M-class activity in the next 24 hours.