"We believe we can now predict when a CME will hit Earth with only 3-hours of uncertainty," says Angelos Vourlidas of the Naval Research Lab, who helped develop the model. "That's a four-fold improvement over older methods."
Coronal mass ejections are billion-ton clouds of hot magnetized gas that explode away from the Sun at speeds topping a million mph. Sometimes the clouds make a beeline for Earth and when they hit they can cause geomagnetic storms, satellite outages, auroras, and power blackouts. The ability to predict the speed and trajectory of a CME is key to space weather forecasting.
FULL ARTICLE: http://earthchangesmedia.com/
