To our spacalrt subscribers:
As you all know, we have been operating a real-time space alert system since October 2003 (our first red alerts were the famous "halloween storms" of 2003). The link recently changed from space.rice.edu/ISTP/wind.html
to
http://mms.rice.edu/realtime/forecast.html
It should forward, but please update your scripts.
We depend on ACE to form the bases of our predictions of the polar cap potential drop, AE, Dst, and Kp.
When ACE has a short data dropout, we average over the last good data and keep going.
However, as recently, when ACE has long dropouts the prediction algorithm fails, and so it has lately not been generating a plot at all.
We will revise our scripts tonight so that the system will always show the best recent data, but please be aware that in some cases the predictions may be many hours old. Each plot should have prominently on it the time, so please check the time on the plots before relying on the predictions.
I hope that the ACE difficulty will be short-lived; however it is crucial that a new space weather monitor be launched as soon as possible to avoid future failures.
This is a free service of the Rice Space Institute, initially funded by CISM and now part of MMS.