Earth-facing major solar flare, stormy space weather

A major X-Class solar flare peaking to X1.2 was reported at 18:30 UTC Tuesday. Active Region 11944 unleashed its second eruption in 12 hours beginning with a M7.2 at 10:13 UTC. The eruption occurred while in an earth-facing position which means the resulting Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) will have a strong earth directed component. Impact on earths magnetic field is expected in the early morning hours of January 10 where strong Geomagnetic storms will be possible.  

Proton levels are rising again due to the latest eruption and are expected to hit (S2) threshold associated with this event was a 10cm radio burst lasting 50 minutes and reaching 8300 solar flux units. SolarWatcher

STORMY: The X1-flare that hurled the CME toward Earth also accelerated a swarm of high-energy protons in our direction. Effects of the proton fusillade are visible in this Jan. 7th coronagraph movie from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO):

The "snow" in this movie is caused by solar protons striking the spacecraft's CCD camera. A veritable blizzard of speckles develops as the CME emerges into full view. Indeed, many of the protons are accelerated by shock waves at the forefront of the expanding cloud.

This ongoing radiation storm ranks S2 on NOAA storm scales. It is rich in "hard" protons with more than 100 MeV of energy, which accounts for the snowiness of the SOHO coronagraph images. According to NOAA, "passengers and crew in high-flying aircraft at high latitudes may be exposed to elevated radiation risk" during such a storm.

The source of all this activity is AR1944, one of the biggest sunspots of the past decade. The sprawling active region is more than 200,000 km wide and contains dozens of dark cores. Its primary core, all by itself, is large enough to swallow Earth three times over.

ROCKET LAUNCH FOILED BY SOLAR ACTIVITY: Orbital Sciences Corp. scrubbed today's launch of their Antares supply rocket to the International Space Station in response to an ongoing solar radiation storm, described above. SpaceWeather