FACE off

(UPDATED)

The run last night was pretty useless. Although conditions were optically good no activity occurred at all and the ionosphere essentially disappeared. The one quiet arc that we saw did not come to anything and although a substorm did occur, it was not until our run had finished and the optical conditions had deteriorated.



It is an ASK run tonight and we have bad skies with some rain and snow today. The ionosphere was originally perky but then faded. It does seem to be coming back a bit now, perhaps due to some IMF-Mag coupling since Bz has been southward a few times this evening for 10-40 minutes. The slow solar wind speed (~350 km/s) means quite a delay before the effects may be felt here.



We have canceled tomorrow night; I was originally intending to run since the solar wind stream should be rotating into view. However it is Southampton's last opportunity for ASK and so we have given them the chance. I am unsure what the weather will be like though. We are going to run on both Sunday and Monday and hopefully the weather will be good...

UPDATE (20:00 UT): Conditions have improved, the sky is clearing, auroral arcs can be seen and there is a quite strong E-layer. We have just switched over to arc1.