Wireless weather

Were you one of the people on Sunday 15 May who bemoaned the noisy and strange HF propagation, the screeches and moans from the ionosphere, and other HF oddities? Rest assured, you were not alone.

The Sun had a Coronal Mass Ejection on Friday 13 May, propelled in our direction by an M8-class explosion near sunspot 759 on the upper hemisphere of the Sun, that hit the Earth's ionosphere at around 0230UTC on Sunday 15 May.

The US NOAA's lead operations specialist at NOAA Space Environment Centre, Gayle Nelson, was reported saying, "This event registered a 9 on the K-Index, which measures the maximum deviation of the Earth's magnetic field in a given three-hour period.... The scale ranges from 0 to 9, with 9 being the highest. This was a significant event."
This event caused incredibly significant and bright auroras across the northern hemisphere.

Of course, you can get warning of such events by subscribing to various email lists. The other option is to watch the web site www.spaceweather.com.

You can also get virtually real-time images from the SOHO spacecraft that stares at the Sun and returns images from variousinstruments, by looking at http://ares.nrl.navy.mil/realtime.html. If you do that, you might even discover a sun-grazing comet crossing the imaging field.

Peter Ellis VK1KEP

Source: Wireless Institute of Australia

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