| | Switch to: Europe, USA, New Zealand, Antarctica Credit: NOAA/Ovation Planetary K-index Now: Kp= 1 quiet 24-hr max: Kp= 2 quiet explanation | more data Interplanetary Mag. Field Btotal: 5.6 nT Bz: 1.3 nT north more data: ACE, DSCOVR Updated: Today at 2349 UT Coronal Holes: 14 Jun 17 Solar wind flowing from the indicated coronal hole should reach Earth on June 16th. Credit: NASA/SDO. Noctilucent Clouds NASA's AIM spacecraft, which monitors NLCs from space, recent moved into a new orbit around Earth. Daily data are currently unavailable while the spacecraft's pointing settles. Polar images should resume in early June. Stay tuned! Switch view: Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctic Peninsula, East Antarctica, Polar Updated at: 02-24-2017 17:55:02 SPACE WEATHER NOAA Forecasts | | Updated at: 2017 Jun 14 2200 UTC FLARE | 0-24 hr | 24-48 hr | CLASS M | 01 % | 01 % | CLASS X | 01 % | 01 % | Geomagnetic Storms: Probabilities for significant disturbances in Earth's magnetic field are given for three activity levels: active, minor storm, severe storm Updated at: 2017 Jun 14 2200 UTC Mid-latitudes | 0-24 hr | 24-48 hr | ACTIVE | 30 % | 35 % | MINOR | 10 % | 15 % | SEVERE | 01 % | 01 % | High latitudes | 0-24 hr | 24-48 hr | ACTIVE | 15 % | 15 % | MINOR | 25 % | 20 % | SEVERE | 40 % | 20 % | | | | | | | | | | | | Lights Over lapland is excited to announce that Autumn Aurora Adventures are available for immediate booking! Reserve your adventure of a lifetime in Abisko National Park, Sweden today! | | | NASA TRIES AGAIN TO PRODUCE ARTIFICIAL CLOUDS: On Thursday, June 15th, NASA will attempt to overcome a series of weather and hazard-related postponements to launch a sounding rocket over the east coast of the USA. The Terrier-Improved Malemute rocket will blast off between 9:05 and 9:20 p.m. EDT and release a network of red and blue-green vapors more than 100 miles high. Tracking the motions of the colorful gases will help researchers study the dynamics of Earth's ionosphere. The vapor tracers may be visible from New York to North Carolina and westward to Charlottesville, Virginia. A HOLE IN THE SUN'S ATMOSPHERE: A large hole has opened in the sun's atmosphere and it is turning toward Earth. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is monitoring the structure, shown here in an extreme ultraviolet image taken on June 13th: This is a coronal hole (CH) -- a region where the sun's magnetic field peels back and allows solar wind to escape. A fast-moving stream of solar wind from this coronal hole is expected to arrive on June 16th, possibly sparking G1-class geomagnetic storms. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras, especially in the southern hemisphere where autumn darkness favors visibility. Forecasters note that this stream is unusually fast with wind speeds as high as 700 km/s. Moreover, it is threaded with "negative polarity" (south-pointing) magnetic fields. Such fields do a good job connecting to Earth's magnetosphere and energizing geomagnetic storms. Free: Aurora Alerts Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery ANTARCTIC MOONDOGS: At Germany's Neumayer III Research Station in Antarctica, the polar night began on May 21st and no one has seen the sun in weeks. "Hence, I could not believe my eyes on June 12th when I opened the station's weather monitor and suddenly could see a sundog," reports Stefan Christmann, who is visiting as part of a BBC film crew working on a documentary about emperor penguins. "I quickly grabbed my camera, got dressed and ran outside." This is what he saw: "In fact," he says, "it was a moondog--the lunar equivalent of a sundog." As the waning full Moon rose behind the station, it shone through crystals of ice floating above the frozen terrain. These crystals bent and shaped the moonbeams into moondogs, a moon pillar and even an upper tangent arc. "In combination with a clear and starry sky, this was quite the sight," says Christmann. "Antarctica is an awesome place, full of little miracles and incredible nature - this needed to be shared with every space weather enthusiast." (Agreed!) Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery FOR THE FATHER WHO HAS EVERYTHING: Yes, that really is a Vulcan rubber duck. The students of Earth to Sky Calculus flew the pointy-eared water bird to the stratosphere as part of their ongoing program to monitor cosmic rays, and you can have him for $79.95. He makes a great Father's Day gift: "Mr Squawk" hitchhiked on a helium balloon payload that carried an array of X-ray/gamma-ray sensors. By launching these sensors 3 or 4 times a month, the students have shown that cosmic rays are intensifying--a trend that affects mountain climbers, air travelers, high-altitude drones and astronauts on the International Space Station. This research is crowd funded. Would you like to support it? Buy a duck! Mr. Squawk comes with unique Father's Day card showing the duck at the top of Earth's atmosphere. The interior of the card tells the story of the flight and confirms that this gift has been to the edge of space and back again. Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store All proceeds support hands-on STEM education Realtime Comet Photo Gallery Every night, a network of NASA all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics. Daily results are presented here on Spaceweather.com. On Jun. 14, 2017, the network reported 37 fireballs. (37 sporadics) In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. The orbits are color-coded by velocity, from slow (red) to fast (blue). [Larger image] [movies] Potentially Hazardous Asteroids ( PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time. On June 14, 2017 there were 1803 potentially hazardous asteroids. | Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) | 2017 HV4 | 2017-Jun-10 | 19.5 LD | 3.9 | 50 | 2017 KF3 | 2017-Jun-11 | 12.9 LD | 11.2 | 40 | 2010 VB1 | 2017-Jun-16 | 10.3 LD | 8.3 | 81 | 471984 | 2017-Jun-18 | 19.1 LD | 7.7 | 102 | 441987 | 2017-Jun-24 | 7.9 LD | 12.7 | 178 | 2017 BS5 | 2017-Jul-23 | 3.1 LD | 5.8 | 54 | Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on the date of closest approach. | Cosmic Rays in the Atmosphere | Readers, thank you for your patience while we continue to develop this new section of Spaceweather.com. We've been working to streamline our data reduction, allowing us to post results from balloon flights much more rapidly, and we have developed a new data product, shown here: This plot displays radiation measurements not only in the stratosphere, but also at aviation altitudes. Dose rates are expessed as multiples of sea level. For instance, we see that boarding a plane that flies at 25,000 feet exposes passengers to dose rates ~10x higher than sea level. At 40,000 feet, the multiplier is closer to 50x. These measurements are made by our usual cosmic ray payload as it passes through aviation altitudes en route to the stratosphere over California. What is this all about? Approximately once a week, Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus fly space weather balloons to the stratosphere over California. These balloons are equipped with radiation sensors that detect cosmic rays, a surprisingly "down to Earth" form of space weather. Cosmic rays can seed clouds, trigger lightning, and penetrate commercial airplanes. Furthermore, there are studies ( #1, #2, #3, #4) linking cosmic rays with cardiac arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death in the general population. Our latest measurements show that cosmic rays are intensifying, with an increase of more than 13% since 2015: Why are cosmic rays intensifying? The main reason is the sun. Solar storm clouds such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) sweep aside cosmic rays when they pass by Earth. During Solar Maximum, CMEs are abundant and cosmic rays are held at bay. Now, however, the solar cycle is swinging toward Solar Minimum, allowing cosmic rays to return. Another reason could be the weakening of Earth's magnetic field, which helps protect us from deep-space radiation. The radiation sensors onboard our helium balloons detect X-rays and gamma-rays in the energy range 10 keV to 20 MeV. These energies span the range of medical X-ray machines and airport security scanners. The data points in the graph above correspond to the peak of the Reneger-Pfotzer maximum, which lies about 67,000 feet above central California. When cosmic rays crash into Earth's atmosphere, they produce a spray of secondary particles that is most intense at the entrance to the stratosphere. Physicists Eric Reneger and Georg Pfotzer discovered the maximum using balloons in the 1930s and it is what we are measuring today. | The official U.S. government space weather bureau | | The first place to look for information about sundogs, pillars, rainbows and related phenomena. | | Researchers call it a "Hubble for the sun." SDO is the most advanced solar observatory ever. | | 3D views of the sun from NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory | | Realtime and archival images of the Sun from SOHO. | | from the NOAA Space Environment Center | | a proud supporter of science education and Spaceweather.com | | fun to read, but should be taken with a grain of salt! Forecasts looking ahead more than a few days are often wrong. | | from the NOAA Space Environment Center | | the underlying science of space weather | | Beautyz for top beauty products reviews and their buying guides | | Reviews here can help you to pick up best memory foam mattresses. | | These links help Spaceweather.com stay online. Thank you to our supporters! | | | | | | | | | | | | ©2017 Spaceweather.com. All rights reserved. This site is penned daily by Dr. Tony Phillips. | |