At least I am in the correct topic. Kiruna just dove and bounced back. 😊 one of the rare times you might wish for a later arrival time…. Doubt it’s a CME though.

10 hours ago, Philalethes said:

What we're currently seeing is undoubtedly bad data. It's not always easy to say with complete certainty, and @Jesterface23 probably has more experience determining that, but when you see all the data streams drop out completely near such abnormal values you can be very sure that it's bad data; also when it's vacillating so chaotically rather than having at least some consistency at the values it's supposedly changing to. In this particular case what makes it even more obvious is that MAG itself is clearly failing; we can not only see that from the sporadic equally abnormal values there, but we just got MAG from DSCOVR back and can compare with that, where we don't see any such blips at all.

As for that person, it's going to be very hard to verify if what they're saying stands up to scrutiny or not; people very easily lead themselves to believe in a lot of things simply because they think they've spotted some correlation where there really is none. That being said it's not completely beyond imagining that higher-density wind and resulting stronger compression (holding speed equal) could cause some effects in more unusual cases (like perhaps a massive CME impact right in the middle of a substorm, heh), but I'm extremely skeptical that that is in fact what they're witnessing here.

Is the timestamp data there local time or UTC? From a quick search such timestamps are generally given in local time, so I will assume that for now; this means it would have been taken 10-01T03:26Z, with the corresponding substorm seen here in the Canadian magnetometers at around 03:30Z:

The corresponding solar wind is marked with the red line here (~35 minutes earlier, 0.01 au at ~700 km/s)

Here we can see the purported density spikes they are referring to, but one thing is immediately obvious: given the intermittent dropout of not just the density, but the other values as well, this looks very much like bad data to me; and moreover the lack of anything peculiar in the IMF also would suggest that. They claim each spike led to a repeated "brightening and quickening of the display", but that is to my knowledge (don't have much personal experience there, but judging by the accounts of others, of which I have read quite a lot) something you frequently see as part of regular storm conditions as well, as often reflected in magnetometer readings moving quite a bit up and down during substorms.

So I'm left with two hypotheses here:

1) There was some abnormal wind that had a very odd and suspect signature, and this actually had an effect on the auroral display, like they claim.

2) It was just bad data, and the person in question overactively pattern matched that bad data to fluctuations in the auroral display that you'd generally see anyway.

Personally I would have to go with 2) here, as it seems the by far most likely to me from experience; but I will keep an open mind and not rule out 1) entirely.

I write a word, you write a novel

On 10/3/2025 at 12:39 AM, JessicaF said:

Somebody should annihilate that celestial body once for all. Good luck. It is storming at Katahdin but rather low.

Read the book 7eves for what happens during that plot line. It's written by the guy who wrote Snowcrash

On 10/5/2025 at 5:32 AM, Jesterface23 said:

I write a word, you write a novel

Brevity: The concept does not exist for our Philalethes 😊. ( signed Me. Your resident curmudgeon of many and certainly less interesting posts) 🤣

Edited 8 hours ago8 hr by hamateur 1953