Gorgeous filament eruption today!

It has been a month since my last update here, and the Oct 10 storm was the first real test of a lot of it. So here is how the site did, then what's new.

How it did on Oct 10. The arrival window for the Oct 8 CME opened at 17:06 UT on the 10th. The shock reached L1 at 14:40 UT, about two and a half hours before that. The storm estimate had an upper range of G2. It reached G3. So the timing was close and the strength was under. Both go on the public scoreboard with every other forecast the site has issued. So far that is 8 scored: 7 arrived inside the window, 1 just outside, with a median miss of about 10 hours.

I also ran a stricter test of the storm strength estimate and it did not hold up. At launch time it does no better than guessing the same level every time. The science page says so. The direction of a CME's magnetic field decides the storm, and nobody can measure that until it reaches L1.

What's new since September

A redesign. The CME list is now a table: launch, speed, whether it is aimed at Earth, and when it should arrive. Click one and the answer comes first: arrival time, the 80% window as a bar, and the likely storm strength.

A record of each forecast. Every CME now shows how its arrival forecast has moved and why, for example when NASA revises the speed. Once the window closes it shows what actually arrived.

Magnetic wake. A new map layer that draws the magnetic field measured at L1 where that plasma is now. A ribbon trails out from Earth, red where the field pointed south and blue where it pointed north. Each storm leaves a striped fan. The May 2024 replay is the one to look at.

A rebuilt 3D view. CMEs are whole cones now, the Sun is the real SDO image for that hour, and you can put the camera on Earth and watch a CME aimed at us turn into a halo.

Two new charts. A time-distance chart with every CME as a line climbing from the Sun. And a storm anatomy chart that puts one eruption on a single time axis: flare, protons, transit, the wind at L1, then Kp and Dst.

Satellite drag. An Atmosphere view that shows how much a storm swells the upper air, with the measured altitude of the ISS, Tiangong and Hubble back to 2015.

Maps. The aurora oval as a map you can tap for your location, and a radio blackout map for flares.

A status page. NASA moved its CME catalogue to a new address on Sept 30 and the site stopped picking up new eruptions for four days before I noticed. That is fixed. Now every data feed is checked every 10 minutes on a public page.

It also installs as an app from Chrome, Edge or a phone's home screen.

Still free, no account needed.

https://www.cmetracker.ai/live?utm_source=solarmax

What would you want to see next? And if you watched the Oct 10 storm on it, what did you check first?

Tonight's amazing aurora from orbit, 10pm EST

Credit: Astronaut Anil Menon

At 14:45 UTC (10:45 EST) today there was a CME impact of 25 nT, which was most likely one or multiple of the relatively weak CMEs that AR4549 has shot over the past few days. The strength of the impact makes me think it was probably multiple. Since then, Bt strength (magnetic field strength) has increased to a little over 40 nT which is very high, maybe a few times per year occurrence. The solar plasma density also reached 100 P/cm^3. (just to be clear, this is NOT anything to worry about! there is no threat to the power grid or anything else from this storm. The only thing to worry about is whether or not there’s auroras.)
Since this is a very messy storm (combination of a bunch of glancing blows / indirect hits that were weaker) it’s difficult to tell what it might do. Right now the direction of the IMF is relatively stable in the north direction, which is worse for aurora viewing than if it were south because it doesn’t allow for good connection between our magnetic field and the CMEs. However, because of the multiple cmes and possible CIR later on (coronal hole high speed stream), this could go on any direction. If we’re very lucky, the Bz could turn south for a long time and give us a great storm. Or it could fizzle out and die in a few hours. Theres no telling for sure.
We’re currently at G1 storm levels. If the Bz turns south, we could easily hit G4 levels, but that’s a very big IF. regardless, make sure to keep a lookout for auroras, even if you’re at mid latitudes.

17:00 UTC / 1:00 PM EST update: Bt has dwindled slightly but has turned strongly south atleast for a short period of time. If you’re where it’s dark, be on the lookout now!

18 UTC / 2 PM EST update: solar wind is rising up to nearly 900 km/s now which makes me think these CMEs include the M6 from a few days ago. That makes it less likely that we will see another CME impact during this storm, HOWEVER a few hours ago the same region unleashed another CME that may hit us in a few days. Back to the current storm, we have now reached G3 and HPI is rising. There have been reports of naked eye aurora in mid latitude in Europe and Australia so if you live there, LOOK OUTSIDE!!!

19:30 UTC / 3:30 EST update: Bz has gone up near 0 and Bt has fallen, so auroral activity likely will decrease in the immediate future. However, as the storm progresses, activity could increase again.

23:30 UTC / 7:30 EST update: The bulk of the storm seems to have passed for now. There may still be enough energy for some faint colors to be seen from mid latitudes in the USA tonight. There’s also good potential for more storming this weekend thanks to a coronal hole rotating towards us.

1:30 UTC / 9:30 PM EST update: The Bt seems to have stabilized around 20 nT with Bz stable around 10 nT. Because of the messy nature of the storm and the fact that the strength has stopped waning for the time being I think it’s possible that the Bz could tip south. Even if it doesn’t, though, minor auroral activity is persisting at high-mid latitudes and the potential remains for a small substorm or two for mid latitudes sometime tonight thanks to how much energy was stored in the magnetosphere (we reached -211 DST!)

Preliminary GOES SUVI 195Å View showing the expansion of the CME that occured 20mins ago.

Active Region 4549 has been growing magnificently on the Earth facing disk and released two M flares within hour of each other with CME showing up on coronagraph as asymmetrical halos with possible Earth directed material.

The IRIS satellite has a more focused field of view and higher image cadence than SDO which can reveal detail within active regions with high enough resolution for scientific research. The black line scanning up and down is split for spectral analysis of the observed solar phenomenon.

I pulled every CME in NASA's DONKI catalog since 2016 that has a cone-model fit, 6,577 of them, and plotted each at the latitude and longitude of its direction on an unrolled Sun, sized by speed. The active belts draw themselves and the poles are nearly empty: 366 launches above 60° in ten years.

The part I did not expect is the butterfly. Plotted by date and latitude it is not the sunspot butterfly. Through 2018 to 2020 the few dozen CMEs a year were almost all aimed within 10° of the equator, even though the spots of the time sat higher. By 2024 the median direction was 28° from the equator and only one in five was equatorial. My read is deflection toward the streamer belt, strongest while the global field is a simple dipole at minimum, the effect Cremades and Bothmer described in 2004, showing up in the catalog without anyone looking for it.

Caveats up front. These are cone-model directions, which is where the CME went, not exactly where its source region sat. The far side depends on STEREO-A and limb events, so it is thinner for coverage reasons. "Earth inside the cone" is a launch geometry test, not a hit list.

The page with the ten-year map, the butterfly, and one Sun per year through NOAA's forecast years to 2031: https://www.cmetracker.ai/launches?utm_source=solarmax

Has anyone seen the minimum-year deflection quantified from DONKI before? I would like to compare it against a proper source-region catalog.

4sdf

Our Star structures plasma filament between neutral areas of opposing magnetic domains within the coronasphere. This in-between area allows cooler, denser plasma to suspend above the "surface" of the Sun, bringing forth this beauty of a Solar Prominence.

How could someone begin knowing if an X flare happened today? Where would they go to find that knowledge?

Hint hint...those who learn this knowledge. START DOING SO IN THIS SUBREDDIT.

With your OPINION. Your own interpretation of what means. What happened. Regardless of scientific expertise. There is no wrong answer.

What could the flare be impacting? Why certain areas more than others? Does it impact the weather? Could it affect humans since we know can impact technology? What have you personally experienced when certain more powerful storms have happened?

If we know its simply your opinion then no one can judge you if its wrong or correct.

Then also all will feel free to share theirs as well.

Can someone also explain what causes certain flares to be more powerful than others?

Does other planet alignment or the moon have an effect on the sun's reaction?

What does each flare represent?

What is a geomagnetic storm?

Appreciate all the answers! Let's all learn together.

What does this expose? If we aren't getting presented or reminded of something, would we know its even happening? So does that mean if we aren't creating about a specific topic and no one fills that void that something will slowly wither away?

Answer truthfully, have all of you begun to visit this subreddit less since the analysis posts stopped?

If yes, who can be the one to simply be the person that posts each flare that happens. Rating / day / intensity. Who will fill this role?

Then another person can analyze what they think means. What caused. What trajectory the sun is going on. How compares to previous things. Who will fill this role?

Another person can be the one to post the graphs, the images, the videos. Who will fill this role?

Then another person can be the one that educates based on the already existing science knowledge so that people get up to speed what all means. What does each flare rank and letter represent? Why do geomagnetic storms happen at times and other times not? When did the greatest flares in history happen? Which historic moments happened around that time?

Who will fill each role?

Just start people if you care about this. Otherwise, if something begins decaying you have none to blame but yourselves.

This NW filament erupted for three hours with a very whispy texture, viewed from GOES SUVI.

Soundtrack is called "Been there, Done that." Sorry, I'm not that great with mastering tracks, Bass might be a bit too strong.

Hi All,

It's been awhile since I updated the progress on the Coronal Mass Ejection Tracker. Here is a list of everything that has been added over the last few months. Available at www.cmetracker.ai

Forecasting

- A fluid solar wind model now runs in your browser. It solves the inner heliosphere from our own L1 archive, in the style of the HUXt model from Reading, and draws it under the top-down map with speed and density color modes. On our validation set it beats the drag model we have used up to now.

- Every Earth-directed CME gets an ensemble run. The fluid model runs 200 times with the speed, direction, width and launch time jittered, and puts a calibrated 80 percent arrival window on the CME card.

- We check our own work. A cron scans the wind archive for shock fronts and gradual arrivals, scores every forecast against them, and publishes a rolling 90-day scoreboard on the help page and the homepage. A 30 minute lead time error on an arrival is a hit, a forecast that never arrives is a miss, and you can see both.

- Regions facing Earth. Each numbered sunspot region gets a chance of an Earth-directed CME over the next three days, from a model back-tested on ten years of DONKI and NOAA region data. It sits on the future side of the timeline as bars and is scored by the same cron. Capped at 30 percent on purpose, because about half of Earth-directed CMEs come from regions that never got a number.

- High-speed streams. Detected from our wind archive, forecast to return 27 days later, and drawn on the map as the corotating spiral bands they actually are.

Live data

- Magnetosphere. The magnetopause and bow shock shaped by the measured L1 wind using the Shue 1998 and Farris and Russell 1994 models, as a card with field lines, aurora ovals, sheath flow and reconnection sparks, and as a rotatable 3D view. It goes red when the nose is inside geosynchronous orbit. Scrub back to May 2024 and watch the Gannon storm push it in to 5 Earth radii.

- The whole 120-day timeline is now measured wind, not just the last week. Speed, density, Bz and field strength come from our own archive when you scrub past the NOAA feed.

- Live coronagraph card from CCOR-2 and CCOR-1, served from our own permanent archive of every frame.

- Radio bursts. Type II, III and IV bursts appear at the Sun timed to the playhead, with a light-speed ripple and provisional CME cones from the Type II drift. Backfilled from SWPC's event archive to 2015.

- New header readouts: Dst with a ring current popout, daily sunspot number and 10.7 cm flux, and a redesigned density popout.

- NOAA moved its L1 station to SOLAR-1 in the spring. The tracker follows the on-duty craft and shows it on the map, with IMAP as backup.

Tracker

- The Kp popup shows inbound CMEs as calibrated bars on the Kp axis, and merges arrivals within 8 hours into one.

- Clip export records the playback as a video you can share. There is also a branded PNG export of the visible map.

- The dashboard remembers your layers, view and filters between visits. A Solo toggle shows only the selected CME. Isolate keeps filtering after you go live. Every flare row is clickable.

- Keyboard camera control in the 3D view.

- Spacecraft layer with portraits for all ten craft we source from, now including Mio on BepiColombo.

- A proper phone layout: simplified chrome, a bottom sheet for the selected CME, and the full site nav in the menu.

New pages

- The landing page is now at the root and the tracker lives at /live.

- /observatories, the spacecraft behind the data.

- /cycle, where we are in the solar cycle, live.

- /radio, HF band conditions and what a burst does to them.

- /today, a plain daily activity page.

- /what-is-a-cme, the explainer.

- /sky, a calendar of things worth going outside for: Perseids, Geminids, Quadrantids, Orionids, Leonids, this year's lunar eclipse, the 2027 total solar eclipse, and the planet oppositions.

- /learn rebuilt as a six-module course that runs on the real map, with quizzes and a storm lab, plus /teachers with printable worksheets.

- Four new famous storms in the replay library: the 1921 Railroad storm, May 1967, August 1972 and Starlink 2022. Gannon 2024 got its two new radiation belts.

- The help page has a video tour and a screenshot for every layer.

Alerts and social

- Arrival alerts are reworked. The trigger is a sustained 30 minute southward window that we backtested against 11 years of data, the wording gives a G1 to G2 style band instead of a single number, and every alert gets a follow-up saying whether it verified or fizzled.

- Alert emails carry a generated image of the isolated CME that links straight to it on the map.

- The tracker is on X as u/CMETracker1. Every new direction-determined CME and every arrival gets posted with the map image.

Like always, no ads or accounts, just a free educational tool for monitoring space weather