Not for Rad Trads, unless you are also frequent flyers…
From Spaceweather…
RADS ON A PLANE: Regular readers know that Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus regularly fly balloons to the stratosphere to measure cosmic rays. For the past six months, May through Oct. 2015, they have been taking their radiation sensors onboard commercial airplanes, too. The chart below summarizes their measurements on 18 different airplanes flying back and forth across the continental United States.
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Read the rest there.
Meanwhile…
CHANCE OF FLARES: NOAA forecasters have boosted the odds of an M-classsolar flare today to 30%. They are responding to the emergence of sunspot AR2434 near the sun’s southeastern limb. Earlier this week while AR2434 was on the farside of the sun, it hurled several clouds of plasma over the limb: movie. This suggests it is capable of significant explosions. Solar flare alerts: text or voice
Significant explosions. That’s what we want to hear.
Then…
ENORMOUS CORONAL HOLE: A gigantic hole in the sun’s atmosphere has opened up and a broad stream of solar wind is flowing out of it. This is called a “coronal hole.” It is the deep blue-colored region in this extreme UV image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory:
Coronal holes are places in the sun’s atmosphere where the magnetic field unfurls and allows solar wind to escape. In the image above, the sun’s magnetic field is traced by white curving lines. Outside the coronal hole, those magnetic fields curve back on themselves, trapping solar wind inside their loops. Inside the coronal hole, no such trapping occurs. Solar wind plasma is free to fly away as indicated by the white arrows.
For much of the next week, Earth’s environment in space will be dominated by winds flowing from this broad hole. This should activate some beautiful Arctic auroras. NOAA forecasters estimate a 65% of polar geomagnetic storms today as Earth moves deeper into the solar wind stream. Aurora alerts: text or voice
I think this means that the ham radio bands may stink for the time being.
