Detailed Space Weather Report April 9th 2026!

James Koppelman, London's report today. Ladies and gentlemen, things seem very calm here on planet Earth, although the college index is indicating we're in a geomagnetic storm. Now, I do believe that we're facing a geomagnetic storm. I just don't feel as if we're in one right now. Let's see, there are other three indexes indicate that we're in no type of disturbance or storm. We're going to go with our estimated planetary index, the latest and greatest, by NASA and NOAA, and we're looking at KP 1s, 2s, etc. today. So there's not a lot of plasma or solar winds hitting the planet, and we will confirm that. Jumping over to our GOES X-ray flux, GOES-19 satellite, you see we've had the first significant flare since April 4th. Now, it's not substantial, but it is significant. It was an M1.06, so it was an M-class solar flare, and it looks like it might have caused a halo eruption and be inbound for Earth. Now, these smaller flares didn't used to affect us much, but with the huge hole that we have in the southern Atlantic and our dissipated atmosphere, These smaller solar flares have really been affecting Earth. We've seen G3 and G4 storms created by these M-class solar flares. So we're going to keep our eye on this. There was a significant coronal mass ejection that developed from it, or that appeared to, that we'll take a look at. All right, headed over to SpaceWeatherLive.com, taking a look at the solar flares. You can see that last one from 4409, which has been beta gamma for a couple of days now. The only complex sunspot on our solar disk, and it did produce the 1.06 solar flare. It maxed out at about 845 UTC time, and that's going to be about 145 last night, so central time here in the U.S. The rest of the day, it seems fairly insignificant. We're calling out B flares. Now, we're currently running a very low B baseline, a B3.59. Our M1.06 is the strongest in the last 24 hours, in the last 72 hours, really since the 4th of April, today being the 9th. You can see that AR-4409, the Sunspot Group, is really our only significant contributor to anything substantial all day long. I think we only have a 1% chance of having an X-class solar flare today, a 25% chance of having an M-class solar flare today, and that ship did sail, and a 90% chance of having a C-class solar event today. And, of course, we had several C solar flares today. Jumping over to HMI Intensigram, there's really no earth-facing sunspot groups. We have a total of five sunspot groups earth-facing on our star. We have one, 4409, that's about to go around the limb. It did produce the M1.06 flare. Now, I did see a halo eruption, and that must have been a backside event. Although, because of where 4409 is, we still might be affected by that flare, i.e., our planet is always connected on the western limb there, which is what it is. I know you're going to say it looks like the eastern limb, but you'll have to reverse these to get them right. The Earth's always connected on the western limb of the star there, geomagnetically, and that's what pulls us through space with our star. And I guess we are looking at a backside event. You can see a halo eruption all around the star here, moving towards the south here. And if that's not coming from anything Earth-facing, well, that was a significant backside event. we'll be messing with those sunspots sooner rather than later all right real quick it looks like most of the sunspots on the western limb have gone around the limb we have some small coronal holes we might see some solar winds from this one here in the next 20 hours or so and we have some decent looking sunspots coming around the limb now so we could have a few days of some actual flaring here NASA and NOAA are preparing for an event tomorrow a slight G1 geomagnetic storm that might be from the solar winds from that small coronal hole and then on the 11th looks like they're preparing for perhaps this M1.06 flare that did occur on the western limb where our actual geomagnetic connection is and they have us in there for about nine hours of a geomagnetic storm G1 nothing significant looks like it's headed our way currently now i wanted to mention i know everyone was very disappointed with comet C/2023 A1 they disintegrated and came out the other side and really didn't even circle the sun was a very bad forecast well we have a larger comet inbound currently it's not going to be going anywhere close to the sun that is going to go into the inner solar system turn around and leave and this is the comet that was discovered last year C/2024 R3 PanSTARRS and well it should be a sight to see this will be well visible with the naked eye which is something spectacular they said the last comet visible with the naked eye was 2007 i don't think i saw that comet uh i do remember that we had one or a few in the 90s, and I think at least one of those was quite visible to the naked eye. It's quite, quite spectacular when you see something like that. This is going to come only within 0.5 AU, or about 45 million miles to the sun, so it won't disintegrate, and again, it's supposed to brighten up around the 19th and 20th, So that everyone on Earth should be able to see it. So this is going to be something special. Hopefully a treat for everyone, whether without your telescope or binoculars. So get ready for that. We'll cover that in about 10 days. And with that said, everything's pretty quiet besides the M1.06. may or may not be geo-effective, but it won't be a serious hit no matter. God bless folks, please share our videos, please subscribe if you haven't, and always remember that anything is possible. Bizarro world.