Sometimes space weather can be just as noteworthy as weather on Earth. There was an X1 solar flare on October 28, 2021, at 10:35AM CDT (15:35Z) detected by the GOES Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI). The GOES-16 and 17 satellites each house the SUVI, which is an extreme ultraviolet telescope that detects photons that are not detectable from the Earth’s surface.

This type of X1 solar flare event can affect Earth’s conditions. Today’s solar flare is associated with a “strong” R3 radio blackout in which high frequency radio communication can be impaired. The NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) is responsible for observing and forecasting flares. More information is available here.

This SWPC site shows solar animations at various wavelengths and updates in real-time.

NOAA SWPC is also in charge of monitoring and forecasting aurora (the northern lights, aurora borealis, or southern lights, aurora australis). Aurora occur as a result of solar flare activity that releases energy into Earth’s magnetic field. NOAA Space Weather has issued a “G3” geomagnetic storm watch, predicting aurora visible as far south as Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Oregon through this Saturday October 30. More information on aurora and aurora forecasts can be found here.

To visualize different characteristics of the sun, CIMSS scientists have built a webapp tool called an “RGB maker” for SUVI data in which data at three different wavelengths are combined to create an image. You can find the tool here. (Note for users: select your red, green, and blue wavelengths and then combine channels. General users can ignore adjusting the scale and gamma factors.)

The SUVI RBG maker functions similarly to how traditional Red Green Blue satellite composites are created, only it combines from the six SUVI bands. Those band wavelengths are: 94 Å, 131 Å, 171 Å, 195 Å, 284 Å, and 304 Å. [One Å (pronounced Angstrom) is equal to 0.0001 microns or 1e-10 meters.] The table below lists the type of solar phenomena that are observable with each band.

Here are some examples of solar RBG composites created with the CIMSS SUVI RGB maker.

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This morning brought a line of severe weather, rain, and thunderstorms to parts of Texas into Louisiana. The system moves eastward, already delivering on a threat of severe weather. As of 2:08 PM CDT (19:08Z) today, October 27, 2021, there is an active tornado warning in multiple parishes throughout Southern Louisiana. The system will continue to move through the Gulf Region through Thursday.

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1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-16 (GOES-East) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) images (above) include time-matched plots of SPC Storm Reports — and showed severe thunderstorms movng eastward across Missouri and Illinois during the late afternoon and early evening hours on 24 October 2021. Most of these storms were developing along and ahead of an advancing cold front (surface analyses), and they produced several tornadoes including a long-track EF-3 in Missouri/Illinois (NWS St. Louis) and a long-track EF-2 in Missouri (NWS Kansas City).

The corresponding 1-minute GOES-16 “Clean” Infrared Window (10.35 µm) images (below) extended into the nighttime hours, and displayed coldest cloud-top infrared brightness temperatures in the -60 to -70ºC range (red to black enhancement).

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A sequence of two intense storms in the north Pacific Ocean, noted in the GOES-17 airmass RGB below, has drawn moisture into the northwestern United States. A MIMIC (Morphed Integrated Microwave Imagery at CIMSS) Total Precipitable Water rocking animation, above (rocking animation from this site), shows the development of a ribbon of moisture that moved into the northwestern United States.

Advected Layer Precipitable Water (ALPW, from this website), differentiates the moisture into layers. At 1200 UTC, one moisture axis was right across the Bay Area of California, with 20-24 mm of moisture in the sfc-850 mb layer, 10-12 mm of moisture in the 850-700 mb layer, and 5 or 6 mm in the 700-500 mb layer.

Accumulated 1-hour precipitation (estimated with CMORPH-2) for the hour ending at 1200 UTC on 22 October, below, shows a ribbon of rain from just north of the Bay Area to central Oregon; largest amounts over northern California are 6-8 mm for the one hour. CMORPH-2 estimates of precipitation are available at RealEarth.

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