Two M-Class Solar Flares, Coronal Hole & Earthquake Uptick

SUN & SCIENCE NEWS: March 9, 2014:
Let's start today's report with the obvious. We had 2 M-Class solar flares in the last 24 hour period. Both from the same sunspot group. The first, last night's M-Class solar flare, was an M1.4 to be exact. It came from the incoming group number 12002. All the space weather monitoring stations are reporting it as a Beta magnetic class group. I understand that it's mostly software doing these analytics, so it may not pick this up because it's on the edge of the Earth-facing solar disk, but with human eyes, I can clearly see that there's more to the picture than it's weak magnetic class and that this sunspot group and it  is most likely not in the Beta class but more like Beta-Gamma. There seems to be some solid magnetic mixing and it already produced double M-class solar flares on top of all these C's just in the last 24 hours. So, I would expect you will see this updated on all the solar monitoring stations within the next 24 hours. Another notable spot is one I mentioned a couple of days ago 11996. This one developed a nice round and defined positive trailing umbra, with a possible increase in it's magnetic complexity to come perhaps? We also have Beta-class group 11998 and it's magnetogram shows us a positive double barrel particle gun, pointed directly at us. Luckily for us on Earth it's not likely to affect us. We had a filament destabilize on the southeastern region of the sun, where coincidentally our magnetic connection to the Sun resides now. It seems to have destabilized when our connection switched it's place from the far-side to this new spot. Good thing is, that it did not produce a visible CME and was in it's totality reabsorbed into the sun. No significant effects, if any, as a result of this are expected here on Earth. That is why we pay attention to these things. This new spot our connection has landed on is a coronal hole stream on the southern hemisphere, the most powerful one on the sun at the moment. There is also a positive and equatorial, coronal hole stream open in the Earth-facing position, letting radiation and charged particles escape into space. To note we had 10, magnitude 5.0 or higher earthquakes around the planet in the last 36 hours. All of the quakes that are part of this up-tick seem to coming from the obvious geologic locales, around plate boundaries and continental divides. The biggest up-tick zone was the Southeast Asia region, especially near the Sumatran subduction zone as some of the quakes came from a depth of over 500km down.

Checking the metrics at Earth we see that the solar wind is reading a really calm 300km/s. Down from 400km/s at this time yesterday. Density look steady is at baseline, that spike looks dramatic but it only went up to 5.5, which is baseline. However the GOES Magnetometer is starting to experience what looks like a small flux of activity. Radio absorption map shows an increase of electron activity with the Total Electron Count numbers starting to climb. the GOES electron count plot is also showing the beginning of a disturbance at Earth. ACE Magnetic field graphs showing a small incoming disturbance after a really really quiet night. Proton flux graphs are showing baseline readings. And the current KP index is showing us a level 1 reading. Last 3 days reflecting the extreme geomagnetic quiet. This changes tomorrow night however with the solar wind density spike arm arriving.