Sunspots could send a solar storm our way as early as Saturday
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
- NOAA Aurora tracker: Shows the predictions of auroras and some other information. Currently predicted that tomorrow you might see something if you're in Vancover BC. Doubtful Seattle ("view line" is best conditions and very faint), we'll need a KP 7 or higher for good visibility in the PNW, but that's not as unlikely as you might think. https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/aurora-dashboard-exper... Second link is main space weather page https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/about-space-weather
- SpaceWeather: Useful site for all things space weather. Has useful links to other things as well. https://spaceweather.com/
- SpaceWeatherGallery: One of aforementioned links https://spaceweathergallery2.com/index.php?title=aurora
There's some paid services that will ping you but they're absurdly expensive. I'd do this but I'm finishing my PhD so you know how that is. But all the data is available from NOAA (e.g. https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/3-day-geomagnetic-forecas...) but it's not super neatly organized. Still I love SpaceWeather but $8/mo is an insane price to ask for what looks like a tool that can be thrown together in a weekend. If anyone gets to it before me let me know, otherwise wait a few months and I'll get to it and post a OSS version here.
Yeah I don't think they do any processing, including centering. Satellites do jiggle though. You may notice that the video they play isn't actually a video but a slide of images. They don't even bother to use ffmpeg to convert to a better viewing format. But I believe this choice is made so they don't restore redundant information as you can download all those images just fine. I mean you can just access the full directory https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/animations/suvi/primar...
The websites aren't really designed for laymen but rather a location for astronomers to just get the public data. That's more up SpaceWeather's alley, where you'll see more animations and some other stuff of that type. But mostly they're leaning off the same public data. (Idk why spaceweather prides themselves on being an "AI Free Zone" when I'd actually be perfectly fine with websites like these being AI driven. I want that front page to be very standardized and it's not like those image captions are in the style that LLMs are going to create catastrophic mistakes for. They're very boiler plate and that's actually what we want)
For anyone following along these are sequential images. "Secondary" is fine. Primary is GOES-18 and Secondary is GOES-16. Looks like 18 just got a little jostle, it happens.
https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/animations/suvi/primar...
https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/animations/suvi/primar...
https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/animations/suvi/primar...
... skipping a few ...
https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/animations/suvi/primar...
Root directory here in case you want to scrape: https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/
A current look at sunspot activity (along with lots of other data) can be found at [1] -- region AR3500 seems interesting, and it includes 12 different sunspots.
0: https://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/sunspots/
1: https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity/sunspot-r...
https://www.energy.gov/ceser/articles/strategic-transformer-...
> It is the latest in a slew of bizarre observations as our sun is getting closer to a near-decadal peak of solar activity.
> It's not clear how our electrical, communication, and satellite system would fare in that scenario, as such a storm hasn't been spotted in decades, in which time humans have become much more reliant on technology.
Or, perhaps, now we are just able to detect those solar activities with more precision than before, earlier, and we got used to have more sensationalist headlines?
> A geomagnetic storm of this magnitude occurring today would cause widespread electrical disruptions, blackouts, and damage due to extended outages of the electrical power grid.
> In June 2013, a joint venture from researchers at Lloyd's of London and Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) in the US used data from the Carrington Event to estimate the cost of a similar event in the present to the US alone at US$600 billion to $2.6 trillion (equivalent to $698 billion to $3.02 trillion in 2021[28]), which, at the time, equated to roughly 3.6 to 15.5 per cent of annual GDP.
But (as with many other 10/100/1000 year events) we have been agressively positioning ourselves to be far more vulnerable to catastrophic impact.
If contemporary society were written in Rust, quite a lot of it would be tagged "unsafe" for lack of wanting to deal with troublesome edge cases.
They are connected to sophisticated models predicting the Sun's weather. They can predict the direction and size of flares.
The point is that for events of this class, we're not just "testing more often" as the person I replied to suggested. We do collect more data and can make more sophisticated models from that data, but the big stuff is a bit like seeing a thundercloud on the horizon and hasn't materially changed for all that tech.
For thunderstorms on the horizon, we have tornado warnings. We also know if the thunderstorms belong to a hurricane since we can track them and somewhat predict their track.
- Met Office Space Weather - https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/specialist-forecasts/sp...
- Aurora Alerts Glendale App - https://aurora-alerts.uk/
Both are free and give good results, you can even install the Glendale app on your phone as a PWA(Chrome for best results, Firefox doesn't work as well) and set it to notify you when a potential aurora is about to happen.
The met office space weather is good for an overview of when one might see activity and the Glendale is superb at short-term predictions(as accurate as those can be with auroras).