Earth Just Exited A Geomagnetic Storm & Had An M-Class Solar Flare August 19th 2026!

James Kaufman, World News Report today. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we've just gotten through another geomagnetic storm caused by these two coronal holes that were earth-facing just about 40 hours ago. Looking at SOHO at 284 angstroms, you can see the two coronal holes are no longer earth-facing. I'd like to point out this really nasty sunspot also coming around the limb, and we have a sunspot that has turned into a delta class sunspot over here on the right all right as you can see we've been in and out of that geomagnetic storm based on those solar winds from those coronal holes and the last peak we had solar winds up to just about 700 kilometers per second which is a little bit faster than i had forecasted i thought they'd go up to about 650 kilometers per second but they didn't quite reach 700 i don't think we'll take a look but this is going to be from uh 10 to 1 a.m last night or utc time from three to six remember that from three to six and this is a well g1 geomagnetic storm exactly a kp5 index and we had well part of that come in a few hours before as well remember there were two coronal holes one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere and the winds weren't necessarily moving at the exact same rate. That's what we see here. We see that there was a small difference. This was actually stronger, the first strike, than a 5.33, just barely stronger, but still stronger. We'll take a look at what the solar winds were doing. Not plasma, because again, this is from a coronal hole, not a solar flare, and not a filament eruption like this was. All right, let's keep going you can see that we're well that has faded away and we're well very calm here on earth according to our Kp index now i wanted to show you all the Kp indexes and this is our estimated planetary Kp index we just looked at you can see the first impact here i don't know if it's from the coronal northern hemisphere or the southern hemisphere and the second impact here we had a a total of nine hours of a geomagnetic disturbance, and a total of six hours of a geomagnetic storm, a G1 geomagnetic storm. Now, it didn't show up as main on the Fredericksburg Index, and it showed up a little bit differently here on the Boulder Index. We're lacking three hours of a geomagnetic disturbance, but we still have two impacts, although they're not at the same times. moving all the way down to our college index you can see that we had a G3 geomagnetic storm and six hours of a G1 geomagnetic storm so it came out totally different it's always the most sensitive as we all know and i just wanted to show y'all really let's concentrate on our estimated planetary Kp index and know that both coronal holes hit us with only about three hours in between the two impacts now although this was redone either yesterday or today they did a pretty good job here on the 19th they don't go quite high enough they have them at about 625 and then falling off Plasma, they have it about two. We'll take a look at that, but this is better than they usually do. All right. Taking a look at what's going on here, it looks like this is showing plasma actually impacting us up here. Nothing too strong. I saw a 16 there. This looks like it's going to be a 17.7. Let's go into a one-day situation, and we can see that the plasma is stayed below 10 centimeters all day today it has dropped off now and it is down at about four they get submitted to all day long so they were way off as usual because it did go up to right around right under 10 centimeters cubed which would have been a geomagnetic storm not even plasma but that would have been caused again by a filament eruption or a solar flare looking down at solar winds the actual cause of this geomagnetic disturbance and storm we have solar winds hitting 621 and 630 at times let's see if we can grab that 630 there's a 630 in there that corresponds with this 50 Kp index down here as you can see this is going to be last night central time 7 to 10, and this is going to be 10 to 1 last night. That's where we had our KP storm, or our geomagnetic storm. And you can see that the temperatures have fallen way down from where they were up here, and the plasma has fallen way down, and the solar winds have also died off. So we're out of trouble as far as that's concerned. We have nothing inbound whatsoever right now but we do have some ugly sunspots coming around the limb uh this is going to be again uh central time it's going to be from 10 to 1 and it's going to be from 3 to 6 UTC time that's where that storm uh actually hits us and that's the first curl hole here that hits us And that's going to be on the 18th, just a few, few hours before the second coronal hole hits us. Of course, both coronal holes will not expel the exact same speed of solar winds. The one in the northern hemisphere is much more defined than the one in the southern hemisphere, as you can tell visually. and here we are checking our work and look there's that three UTC time again and that looks like it's close to 700 kilometers per second we saw 630 on the other one so this is that same time that we have our actual geomagnetic storm and we had one the day before as well but right before the 19 so this matches up perfectly you can see that plasma never went above 10 centimeters cubed The shields were oriented to the north, which helped us out quite a bit, although the winds did not get very strong. And the shields were both up and down, but you will see they were way down here when the strongest winds came in. You can tell because the red goes below the dotted line, telling you that our shields are down. And you can see that lines up perfectly with the strongest solar winds, which probably drove them down. You can also see that temperature has dwindled off to normal positions. All right, so it looks like we've just had perhaps an M flare. We'll check that out. It's going to be really close. If not, folks, we wouldn't get an M flare out of this. An M1 flare. First one we've had in several weeks, I believe, for sure, a week, and probably longer than that. You can see that our baseline is moving way up into the mid-C range, so M flares are going to be easily achievable. We do have that delta-class sunspot on the exiting limb, which is the most complex sunspot that we know of, and it's probably responsible for what we see here. Over on SDO's HMI intensigram, you can see that delta-class sunspot, AR4507, right here. I don't think that it would be geo-effective towards Earth, but it might be. Our connection to the sun is on the outgoing limb. Our geomagnetic connection is on this limb. And sometimes it will travel down that rope or electromagnetic connection and be geo-effective towards Earth on the outgoing limb. We have four sunspots here, three simple and one, well, delta class, as extreme as we know. and then we have some sunspots you can barely see coming around the limb here they're about to be named and they do look ugly so they have not assigned the M1 to a sunspot yet but you can see that every flare today has been from our delta class sunspot 4507 and i would just about bet and we will check it out that this was from 4507 as well and we're going to go over to the 193-cell ultraviolet imager and we can see that sunspot flaring right there and that's the M1 and it looks like there's a sympathetic flare right about that time from a sunspot right there a little bit to the south there the simple sunspot you can see the jet coming off of there but the The one right here exiting is our M1, and this is a sympathetic sunspot right there. So there you go. The M1 was from the Delta class sunspot group, and they might record the other one from a simple sunspot. Probably be a C-class flare. Now, we know we have four very active sunspot groups coming around from the backside of our sun here. and the first one's just about ready to be named here. So we're going to have an interesting 12 to 15 days with some very large, complex sunspots that have been, well, producing what looks like X-class solar flares on the backside. So y'all prepare, and I think we're quiet here, well, for a little while. We should have had, let's see if we had a radio outage with that last M flare. And as you can see, we did. And that just happened a second, about five minutes ago, at the very least. You can see it was over most of North America, including Central America, and most of all the United States, and the Pacific, and the very northern part of South America. So we did get a lot of radiation And there might be a Portion of a coronal mass ejection that we're hit by We'll have to see about that Give them a couple hours and Let them model it over at NASA And NOAA and if it looks like It might impact Earth I will Report it. That said God bless you guys An M flare finally Four ugly sunspots Coming around A Delta sunspot now earth-facing. We're about to be around the far limb. And we just got out of a G1 geomagnetic storm and six hours of a geomagnetic disturbance per the actual KP index. And that was caused by the two coronal holes that were earth-facing about 40 hours ago. Please make sure to share and give us a thumbs up. So important to get that thumbs up. If you can help out, I'd really appreciate it. God bless you all.