Upcoming Meridional Circle Campaign (MERINO) in March

Our Meridian Circle campaign will take place in the coming weeks as planned. This effort is coordinated with the Chinese Meridian Project led by Dr. Chi Wang of National Space Science Center of China. The observation alerting window is between March 13-27, and ISR world days will be for 4 days within the window. I will be making a final decision for the start date, hopefully 3-4 days ahead of this.

The original target of the international campaign is a space weather event. Will this spring cooperate? With predicted monthly F10.7 being 125-135 sfu, we are in the descending solar cycle phase. There was an M-class flare yesterday from the solar region 2297 and the assocaited CME was determined to miss Earth. Magnetic activity is expected to be at quiet to activity levels due to coronal hole high speed streams which can last for a few days. There is some chance that the region 2297 becomes active again, and the old region  2290 will return to face Earth on about March 15. But overall it appears to me that no major disturbance is anticipated in the next week or so.

If nothing serious from the Sun comes, I would be looking at one particular period of high speed solar wind streams which can also disturb the geospace environment and has been an active subject of research. The expected recurrent days are 09-11, 14-19, 23-25 and 28-31 in March, and I would probably pick the March 23-25 period which falls in the later part of our window.

Stay tuned for updates!