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SpaceWeather.com -- News and information about meteor showers, solar flares, auroras, and near-Earth asteroids
 
Solar wind
speed: 364.5 km/sec
density: 4.4 protons/cm3
more data: ACE, DSCOVR
Updated: Today at 2345 UT
X-ray Solar Flares
6-hr max: A2
2244 UT Apr10
24-hr: A3
0258 UT Apr10
explanation | more data
Updated: Today at: 2350 UT
Daily Sun: 10 Apr 20
The sun is blank--no sunspots. Credit: SDO/HMI

Sunspot number: 0
What is the sunspot number?
Updated 10 Apr 2020

Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 5 days
2020 total: 75 days (74%)
2019 total: 281 days (77%)
2018 total: 221 days (61%)
2017 total: 104 days (28%)
2016 total: 32 days (9%)
2015 total: 0 days (0%)
2014 total: 1 day (<1%)
2013 total: 0 days (0%)
2012 total: 0 days (0%)
2011 total: 2 days (<1%)
2010 total: 51 days (14%)
2009 total: 260 days (71%)
2008 total: 268 days (73%)
2007 total: 152 days (42%)
2006 total: 70 days (19%)

Updated 10 Apr 2020


Thermosphere Climate Index
today: 3.64
x1010 W Cold
Max: 49.4
x1010 W Hot (10/1957)
Min: 2.05
x1010 W Cold (02/2009)
explanation | more data: gfx, txt
Updated 10 Apr 2020

The Radio Sun
10.7 cm flux: 70 sfu
explanation | more data
Updated 10 Apr 2020

Cosmic Rays Solar minimum is underway. The sun's magnetic field is weak, allowing extra cosmic rays into the solar system. Neutron counts from the University of Oulu's Sodankyla Geophysical Observatory show that cosmic rays reaching Earth in 2019 are near a Space Age peak.

Oulu Neutron Counts

Percentages of the Space Age average:
today: +10.7% Very High
48-hr change: +0.6%
Max: +11.7% Very High
(12/2009)
Min: -32.1% Very Low (06/1991)
explanation | more data
Updated 10 Apr 2020 @ 1700 UT

Current Auroral Oval:
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: 3.9 nT
Bz: 3.1 nT north
more data: ACE, DSCOVR
Updated: Today at 2345 UT
Coronal Holes: 10 Apr 20

Solar wind flowing from this southern coronal hole could reach Earth on April 11-12.
Credit: SDO/AIA

Noctilucent Clouds Thenorethern hemisphere season for noctilucent clouds is coming soon--probably starting in mid- to late-May. Check here for daily images from NASA's AIM spacecraft.
Switch view: Europe, USA, Asia, Polar
Updated at: 03-02-2020 17:55:02 UT
SPACE WEATHER
NOAA Forecasts
Updated at: 2020 Apr 10 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: 2020 Apr 10 2200 UTC
Mid-latitudes
0-24 hr
24-48 hr
ACTIVE
35 %
10 %
MINOR
10 %
01 %
SEVERE
01 %
01 %
High latitudes
0-24 hr
24-48 hr
ACTIVE
15 %
15 %
MINOR
30 %
20 %
SEVERE
45 %
10 %
 
Friday, Apr. 10, 2020
What's up in space
       
 

Marianne’s Arctic tours: Operating in small groups of 7 to 14 persons--all needs supplied for safety, comfort and pleasure. Night & day photography or non-photographic landscape - wildlife tours. Click for details!

 

SOLAR WIND, INCOMING: A stream of solar wind is approaching Earth. Estimated time of arrival: April 11-12. The gaseous material is flowing from a southern hole in the sun's atmosphere, and could spark auroras around the Arctic Circle when it reaches our planet. Aurora alerts: SMS Text.

MERCURY PROBE FLIES PAST EARTH: Earlier today, the ESA-JAXA BepiColombo spacecraft buzzed Earth. At closest approach, the probe was only 12,700 km above our planet. This sequence of images was taken by one of the BepiColombo's MCAM selfie cameras:

This maneuver, the first of nine planetary flybys but the only one at Earth, helped steer the spacecraft towards Venus as it gradually closes in on its target orbit around Mercury. During its seven-year cruise to Mercury, BepiColombo will twice use the gravity of Venus and six times that of Mercury to brake against the gravitational pull of the sun. So much braking would require more fuel than the small spacecraft can carry, so it is using this complicated series of reverse-slingshot maneuvers instead.

Stay tuned for more images of the flyby!

Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
Free:
Spaceweather.com Newsletter

WHERE THE POWER GOES OUT: A solar superstorm can make your lights go out. New maps released by the USGS show where the power is most likely to fail: The Denver metropolitan area, the Pacific northwest, the Atlantic seaboard, and a cluster of Midwestern states near the US-Canadian Border. Bright yellow and orange trace the trouble spots across the contiguous USA:

Power companies have long been wary of the sun. Solar storms can cause strong electric currents to flow through commercial power lines--so strong that the lines can't handle it. Fuses blow, transformers melt, and circuit breakers trip. The most famous geomagnetic power outage happened during a space storm in March 1989 when six million people in Quebec lost power for 9 hours.

Whether or not *your* power goes out during a solar storm depends on two things: (1) The configuration of power lines in your area and (2) the electrical properties of the ground beneath your feet. In areas of more electrically resistive rock, currents struggle to flow through the ground. Instead, they leap up into overhead power lines – a scenario that played out in Quebec in 1989.

The new maps are possible thanks to Earthscope--a National Science Foundation magnetotelluric survey of the upper 2/3rds of the contiguous USA. Earthscope mapped the electrical properties of deep rock and soil on a continent-spanning grid with points about 70 km apart. USGS researchers led by Greg Lucas and Jeffrey Love combined this information with the layout of modern power lines to estimate peak voltages during a century-class storm.


Sprawling power lines act like "solar storm antennas," picking up currents and spreading the problem over a wide area.

They found a huge variation in hazard across the USA. "The largest estimated once-per-century geoelectric field is 27.2 V/km at a site located in Maine, while the lowest estimated once-per-century geoelectric field is 0.02 V/km at a site located in Idaho. That is more than 3 orders of magnitude difference," they wrote in their research paper "A 100‐year Geoelectric Hazard Analysis for the U.S. High‐Voltage Power Grid." Notably, some of the most vulnerable regions are near big cities: Denver, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC.

To complete the hazard map, the researchers are waiting for a new magnetotelluric survey to cover the rest of the USA. It can't come soon enough. The last "century-class" geomagnetic storm hit in May 1921 ... 99 years ago.

Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
Free:
Spaceweather.com Newsletter

A MOTHER'S DAY GIFT FROM THE STRATOSPHERE: Tell Mom how much you love her -- to the Moon and Back! On March 5th, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched an array of cosmic ray sensors to the edge of space onboard a helium balloon. This Mother's Day pendant went along for the ride:

The silvery crescent declares "I love you to the Moon and Back" and surrounds a 14K gold plated heart labeled "Mom."

You can have it for $99.95. The students are selling these pendants to support their cosmic ray ballooning program. Each one comes with a greeting card showing the item in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space. Sales support the Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray ballooning program and hands-on STEM research.

Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store
All sales support hands-on STEM education


Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery
Free:
Spaceweather.com Newsletter

  All Sky Fireball Network
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 Apr. 10, 2020, the network reported 4 fireballs.
(4 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]

  Near Earth Asteroids
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 April 10, 2020 there were 2018 potentially hazardous asteroids.
Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters:
Asteroid
Date(UT)
Miss Distance
Velocity (km/s)
Diameter (m)
2020 GY1
2020-Apr-05
0.2 LD
12.1
17
2020 GF
2020-Apr-05
7.6 LD
5.2
24
2020 GM
2020-Apr-05
2.3 LD
9.5
18
2020 DT3
2020-Apr-05
17.6 LD
11.8
204
2020 GC1
2020-Apr-05
1.4 LD
10.2
32
2020 GN
2020-Apr-05
6 LD
8.2
12
2020 GV1
2020-Apr-05
6.5 LD
9.3
9
2020 GE1
2020-Apr-06
3.7 LD
4.6
14
2020 FQ6
2020-Apr-06
17.9 LD
11.2
37
2020 GN1
2020-Apr-06
7.7 LD
6.5
13
2020 GB1
2020-Apr-06
1.1 LD
8.3
15
2020 GQ1
2020-Apr-07
4.4 LD
16.9
16
2020 GW1
2020-Apr-08
5.9 LD
13.3
25
2020 GF1
2020-Apr-08
1.5 LD
6.1
20
2020 FL4
2020-Apr-09
10.4 LD
4.6
14
2015 GK
2020-Apr-09
12.2 LD
12.9
25
2020 FW4
2020-Apr-09
19.7 LD
18.6
162
2020 GE
2020-Apr-10
5.4 LD
2.2
8
2019 HM
2020-Apr-10
7.2 LD
3.2
23
2020 GM1
2020-Apr-11
10.2 LD
25.5
64
2020 GU1
2020-Apr-11
5.9 LD
6.9
12
2020 GG
2020-Apr-11
9.7 LD
5.5
17
2020 GA2
2020-Apr-11
8.6 LD
24.7
193
363599
2020-Apr-11
19.2 LD
24.5
224
2020 FX3
2020-Apr-15
14.1 LD
10.3
55
2020 FZ6
2020-Apr-15
20 LD
21.7
189
2020 FV6
2020-Apr-19
10.8 LD
19.7
88
2019 HS2
2020-Apr-26
13.6 LD
12.6
17
2019 GF1
2020-Apr-27
18.7 LD
3.2
12
2020 FM6
2020-Apr-27
14.3 LD
16.9
158
52768
2020-Apr-29
16.4 LD
8.7
2457
2020 DM4
2020-May-01
18.4 LD
6.4
162
438908
2020-May-07
8.9 LD
12.8
282
2016 HP6
2020-May-07
4.3 LD
5.7
31
388945
2020-May-10
7.3 LD
8.8
295
2000 KA
2020-May-12
8.9 LD
13.5
162
478784
2020-May-15
8.5 LD
3.6
28
136795
2020-May-21
16.1 LD
11.7
892
163348
2020-Jun-06
13.3 LD
11.1
339
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

SOMETHING NEW! We have developed a new predictive model of aviation radiation. It's called E-RAD--short for Empirical RADiation model. We are constantly flying radiation sensors onboard airplanes over the US and and around the world, so far collecting more than 22,000 gps-tagged radiation measurements. Using this unique dataset, we can predict the dosage on any flight over the USA with an error no worse than 15%.

E-RAD lets us do something new: Every day we monitor approximately 1400 flights criss-crossing the 10 busiest routes in the continental USA. Typically, this includes more than 80,000 passengers per day. E-RAD calculates the radiation exposure for every single flight.

The Hot Flights Table is a daily summary of these calculations. It shows the 5 charter flights with the highest dose rates; the 5 commercial flights with the highest dose rates; 5 commercial flights with near-average dose rates; and the 5 commercial flights with the lowest dose rates. Passengers typically experience dose rates that are 20 to 70 times higher than natural radiation at sea level.

To measure radiation on airplanes, we use the same sensors we fly to the stratosphere onboard Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray balloons: neutron bubble chambers and X-ray/gamma-ray Geiger tubes sensitive to energies between 10 keV and 20 MeV. These energies span the range of medical X-ray machines and airport security scanners.

Column definitions: (1) The flight number; (2) The maximum dose rate during the flight, expressed in units of natural radiation at sea level; (3) The maximum altitude of the plane in feet above sea level; (4) Departure city; (5) Arrival city; (6) Duration of the flight.

SPACE WEATHER BALLOON DATA: 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 18% since 2015:

The data points in the graph above correspond to the peak of the Regener-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.

En route to the stratosphere, our sensors also pass through aviation altitudes:

In this plot, 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.

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.

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.

  Essential web links
NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center
  The official U.S. government space weather bureau
Atmospheric Optics
  The first place to look for information about sundogs, pillars, rainbows and related phenomena.
Solar Dynamics Observatory
  Researchers call it a "Hubble for the sun." SDO is the most advanced solar observatory ever.
STEREO
  3D views of the sun from NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory
Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
  Realtime and archival images of the Sun from SOHO.
Daily Sunspot Summaries
  from the NOAA Space Environment Center
NOAA 27-Day Space Weather Forecasts
  fun to read, but should be taken with a grain of salt! Forecasts looking ahead more than a few days are often wrong.
Aurora 30 min forecast
  from the NOAA Space Environment Center
Heliophysics
  the underlying science of space weather

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