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Geomagnetic Activity Summary for 2018

Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2018 6:07 pm
by Carbon60
Hi Folks,

It's the end of 2018 and time for a summary of the geomagnetic activity recorded during 2018 on my home brew magnetometer here in the North-West of England. I've had a few short 'outages' with one thing or another, so the record is not as complete as I would have liked, with February and December being particularly weak on usable data. Nevertheless, the record does display the various intermittent bursts of activity that occurred throughout the year from holes in the Sun's outer atmosphere (corona) and consequent fast flowing solar wind. Mostly the resulting storms were weak (G1) with an occasional G2, but all of them resulted in aurora.

The data have been plotted as raw 'rate of change' over time, in arbitrary units, together with running average of these data as a means of smoothing.
2018 Summary.jpg
2018 Summary.jpg (368.4 KiB) Viewed 3404 times
I hope you find this interesting.

Thanks for looking.

Happy New Year to all.
Best wishes for 2019

Stu.

Re: Geomagnetic Activity Summary for 2018

Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2019 11:26 am
by Montana
Both equinox zones looked the most interesting again, it is a good record to use to help plan an aurora holiday :) I hope the problems with the magnetometer are all sorted now?

Happy New Year!
Alexandra

Re: Geomagnetic Activity Summary for 2018

Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2019 12:08 pm
by marktownley
Good stuff Stu! The coronal holes are certainly produce the goods when it comes to aurora. We're off aurora hunting at the end of October, fingers crossed one of those coronal holes is about then.

Re: Geomagnetic Activity Summary for 2018

Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2019 3:17 pm
by Carbon60
Thanks, Alexandra/Mark.

All up and working again :) It took a day or two to get to the bottom of the problem, which I attributed to a noisy power supply. Good luck in October, Mark.

Stu.

Re: Geomagnetic Activity Summary for 2018

Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2019 5:43 pm
by marktownley
Carbon60 wrote: Tue Jan 01, 2019 3:17 pm which I attributed to a noisy power supply.

Noisy power supplies are bad things. They give us more noise in our imaging (USB power) and make our hifi systems sound worse than they should. Now here's one playing havoc with your magnetometer. We got a 'hive' light bulb, and, depending where we plug it in depends on how much it flickered, all down to noisy power.

Re: Geomagnetic Activity Summary for 2018

Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2019 11:03 pm
by p_zetner
That’s an impressive record, Stu.
How does it compare with a solar active year?

I agree with Mark. Noisy power supplies are bad things! Often times very difficult to diagnose.

Cheers and Happy New Year.
Peter

Re: Geomagnetic Activity Summary for 2018

Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2019 7:37 pm
by Carbon60
p_zetner wrote: Tue Jan 01, 2019 11:03 pm That’s an impressive record, Stu.
How does it compare with a solar active year?

I agree with Mark. Noisy power supplies are bad things! Often times very difficult to diagnose.

Cheers and Happy New Year.
Peter
Thanks, Peter.

My records don't go back far enough, unfortunately. I'm looking forward, though, to the next cycle to see how it builds from solar minimum. :)

Stu.

Re: Geomagnetic Activity Summary for 2018

Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2019 7:39 pm
by Carbon60
marktownley wrote: Tue Jan 01, 2019 5:43 pm
Carbon60 wrote: Tue Jan 01, 2019 3:17 pm which I attributed to a noisy power supply.

Noisy power supplies are bad things. They give us more noise in our imaging (USB power) and make our hifi systems sound worse than they should. Now here's one playing havoc with your magnetometer. We got a 'hive' light bulb, and, depending where we plug it in depends on how much it flickered, all down to noisy power.
Hi Mark,

It certainly kept me guessing for a while......

Stu.