How we decide what's worth alerting on
The short version
SolarStormAlert does not invent its own severity ratings. It compiles readings from NOAA SWPC, NASA GOES, and ACE/DSCOVR at the L1 point into NOAA’s own G-scale, and turns a crossing of that scale into an email — at the floor you choose, source-cited every step of the way. This piece describes exactly what triggers that email today, and what does not.
What we watch, and how often
The dashboard polls four public feeds continuously: NOAA SWPC’s Kp index and storm alerts every 15 minutes, NASA GOES X-ray and proton flux every 15 minutes, solar wind data from ACE/DSCOVR at the L1 point every 2 minutes, and NASA DONKI’s coronal mass ejection (CME) tracking hourly. Every reading on the dashboard carries the same source, freshness, and cadence it was polled from directly — the how it works page covers this in full.
What decides an email
Four separate, independently sourced signals can trigger an alert:
- A G-scale crossing at your chosen floor — you set a subscriber floor of G3 (Strong), G4 (Severe), or G5 (Extreme); crossing it sends an alert, sourced to NOAA SWPC’s G-scale.
- A flare-driven radio-blackout heads-up — when GOES X-ray flux crosses the R3 (X1.0) threshold on NOAA’s R-scale, every subscriber receives a heads-up regardless of their G-scale floor, since a strong flare does not by itself mean a geomagnetic storm follows.
- NOAA’s own sudden-impulse relay — when NOAA SWPC issues its own geomagnetic sudden-impulse warning, it is relayed to every subscriber. It is a weaker signal than our own shock detection, and it does not mean a significant storm is confirmed.
- A sharp forecast revision — if NOAA’s 3-day Kp forecast for a future window is revised upward by a full G-scale band, subscribers get a heads-up, distinct from the confirmed G4-or-G5 forecast-severity alert.
Each of these is a separate, source-cited signal — never a single internal score standing in for the agency data behind it.
The no-spam rule
Every distinct official warning is sent at most once. A storm that produces several genuinely separate signals — say, a sudden-impulse relay and a later G4 crossing — can generate more than one email, but the same warning never repeats. There is no daily digest, no “still ongoing” reminder, and no urgency language designed to make you act faster than the data warrants.
What alerts are today
Every alert is an email, sent to the address you subscribed with, at the G-scale floor you chose at signup. A magic link lets you view or change that subscription from any device, no password required.
Check it yourself
Every alert this system sends traces back to one of the sources above, checkable the moment it lands. The same data, updated continuously, is always on the dashboard — you don’t need to wait for an email to see current conditions.