Earth's Current Geomagnetic Storm Arrives Early!

James Kaufman, World News Report Today. Co-rotating interaction regions Sears impact sparks Arctic auroras. Solar winds from the Earth-facing coronal hole arrived almost two days earlier than expected. A co-rotating interaction region, or CIR, hit Earth on November 24th. CIRs are like many CMEs. They do a great job at sparking geomagnetic storms and auroras. Intermittent G1-class storms are underway now as a result of this impact. This morning, while flying a Dreamliner across Canada, pilot Matt Malinsky saw the glow of the CIR from the flight deck as seen here. Quote, these auroras were visible from Calgary to Paris, says Malinsky. The Aurora started as soon as we leveled off at 39,000 feet and continued for over five hours straight. I feel so fortunate and lucky to be seeing Auroras on a weekly basis from the Dreamliner. Pilots need to realize that this is Earth's way of showing that it has no atmosphere to protect them from this pure radiation pouring in over them. CIRs are a way for the sun to ignite auroras without explosive solar activity. What's required is a fast solar wind stream brushing up against a slow one in the transition zone. Between the two streams, rivulets of plasma press magnetic fields together, creating strong, shock-like structures that mimic small CMEs. Last night, we had a great one. And in fact, for our KP index, we've been in a geomagnetic storm. And a geomagnetic disturbance since yesterday. Today we started the storm, the G1 geomagnetic storm. We had a disturbance for three hours after that. We sunk back into a G1 geomagnetic storm. So today we've seen six hours of a geomagnetic storm on the estimated planetary index. Although we did see three hours of a G3 geomagnetic storm on the college KP index. Wow. So, ladies and gentlemen, this is the storm caused by the coronal hole that was earth-facing, and the winds did arrive very quickly. Here is the six hours of G1, KP 4.67 and KP 5, geomagnetic storm, and numerous hours of a disturbance here, folks. And here's a quick look at our Discovery Real-Time Solar Wind Satellite. Supposedly 1 million miles above Earth orbiting. You can see that our shields have been generally negative and down. And they have a southward angle to them. All bad. We haven't seen any strong plasma all day long. These are the twos and threes. And the solar winds that we have seen have been very erratic. Here they were at 730. It dropped all the way down to two. 64. This is because of the circulation of the slow and fast winds shooting right back up to 850. And as we follow that over, well, we're starting to get towards the end of the day, and we're still over 800 kilometers per second. So we should still see a geomagnetic storm G1, Or at least a disturbance. I do see that our... Shields are down and have popped back up, but generally have been down. And here's our current situation. Let's see that coronal hole departing here. It looks like we do have three decent sunspots here. A large filament ready to go at any moment. Looks like we have some sunspots also coming around the limb. Again, this is the coronal hole that just generated the SEIRS. The geomagnetic storm and disturbance we've been in since yesterday. God bless, folks. Share, subscribe, and always remember, anything's possible in the Bizarro World.