Solar Flare And CME Inbound Towards Earth March 16th 2026!

James Kaufman, World News Report today. Ladies and gentlemen, we've had an M2.79 solar flare directly Earth-facing. That was followed by a very strong C-class solar flare as well. Now, this is coming from a complex or semi-complex sunspot group that's, again, directly Earth-facing. We're going to take a look at that right now. This happened right at 12 UTC time, or about 12.30 UTC time, which translates into about 5.30 this morning Central Time here in the U.S. All right, we had a minor flare event peaked at 12.15 UTC time today on the 16th. NOAA and the Space Weather Prediction Center saw region 4392 erupt with an M2.7 R1 minor solar flare early on the 16th of March, 2026. The flare began at 1200 UTC time and lasted 24 minutes, which could have caused some minor high-frequency radio communication degradation over the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, and Southern Europe, particularly at the higher end of the HF radio spectrum. Analysis of the solar flare in various GOES-19 solar ultraviolet imagery indicated characteristics associated with a coronal mass ejection or CME being lifted off the sun and headed towards Earth. Additionally, radio signatures known as radio sweeps were observed by the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force radio solar telescope networks, the RSTN, that also indicated the possibility of a coronal mass ejection movement. However, we're currently waiting for photographic imagery to be available in order to determine if a coronal mass ejection indeed erupted from the sun, and if so, to analyze and model it to determine the potential that it may be Earth-directed. Head over to SpaceWeatherLive.com. We can see that it did pick up that M2.79, M2.3 solar flare, but it hasn't been assigned a sunspot group. In fact, both that flare and the strong sea flare that occurred afterwards generated from sunspot AR4392, A fairly complex sunspot being Beta Gamma. Not yet a Delta-class sunspot, but a Beta Gamma sunspot. And obviously, none of that information has been posted yet. Today, we only have a 1% chance of having an X-class solar flare, a 15% chance of having an M-class solar flare, and I will say that that ship has sailed, and only an 85% chance of having a C-class solar flare, They're calling these flares, they're in the B range out. We really have a low baseline currently. Over to HMI Intensigram. We see that we have a total of six Earth-facing sunspot groups, 4392 being the only one that seems productive and the only one, well, that appears to have sent a coronal mass ejection in Earth's direction. Again, that is a beta-gamma sunspot. Now, we're going to have a video after this one that's going to cover four huge sunspots on the backside of Earth that NASA has located and are warning about currently. Over to COS-19, it's a little ultraviolet imager. This is the sunspot that we're looking at right here. Although the sun looks fairly active to me, I have a small coronal hole right here. You will see this thing pop off pretty hard. There's the unexplained eclipse still, and it's not going to be hard to see this explosion. And there it went. Definitely, definitely create a coronal mass ejection that would be inbound towards Earth. Over to our D region, absorption prediction center, you can see that flare hits right at 12 UTC time, this right here, and last I said about 23, 24, about 30 minutes. That occurred mostly over Africa and the Atlantic Ocean and really occurred over a good part of where our, well, anomaly or hole in the atmosphere is located, which should be a big problem. Now, we should see a sea flare after that. It was fairly sizable as well. So that shows up. And there that is right there over Brazil and parts of the Atlantic as well. maybe the lesser Antilles and just so you know that I did check our Parker spiral shows no coronal ejection being ejected yet this is earth here looks like we got hit by one or are going to be hit by one today but nothing has been projected yet it's just occurred so we're going to have to get it to this afternoon alright headed over to SDO HMI magnetogram image this was taken at 1500 UTC time so we can back that up and we're looking at right about 8 a.m. this morning Central Time on the 16th you'll see right here and the sun doesn't look all that bad at all this is our of course complex beta gamma sunspot group but the polarities seem normal, black over white, southern hemisphere, all the polarities seem normal here, we do have some ugly sunspots coming around, we're going to cover those in our next video, this all looks, well, not very complex whatsoever, finally, over to Soho, 284 angstroms, it's like we still have a large coronal hole that's hard to see here, this, the canopy is missing, directly earth facing there we should be seeing solar winds right now we will check on that before we go you can see there's our sunspot group there it's giving us the problems the M 2.3 solar flare right or M 2.79 to be more exacting and that's going to be sunspot group 4392 so let's keep that in mind let's keep this hole in mind do a real quick check and discover it seems the solar winds are still beating us down all right we had not seen any ground-based geomagnetic storms since yesterday but we had some G1 and G2 geomagnetic storms Kp5 Kp6s and we're taking a look at our Discover satellite now orbiting about 1 million miles above Earth at Lagrange Point 1.4 times as far as the moon. And what are we seeing here? Well, we're not seeing much of anything. No real plasma to speak of. Nothing breaking that 10 centimeters space weather threshold here. And so the wind started the day out pretty good at 650. and have done nothing but die off all day long. We're currently around 500 kilometers per second. Temperature has stayed pretty much normal all day long. So there is no space wind hitting our ace satellites and nothing hitting Earth currently. That said, we will be back to talk about four enormous sunspot groups that are on the backside of the sun currently but are headed around to bring joy to the front side of the sun god bless please share subscribe and always remember that anything's possible bizarro world