N3KL Solar Activity Monitor with no images
Solar X-Rays: Normal
Geomagnetic Field: Quiet
The Text-Only rendition of the N3KL Solar Activity Monitor is completely reworked to function exactly like the original put out by n3kl.org from the user's point of view. I have set the links to point to www.n3kl.org/sun/noaa.html, exactly like the original. I have designed the layout and set the style sheets to look very nearly the same as the original image-based Monitor, with no images involved. I have abandoned the effort to lay it out without use of HTML table tags, simply because Internet Explorer is too primitive to support good modern page design. The only functional difference between N3KL's Monitor and this one is that I still update my information no more than once every three minutes from n3kl.org, which updates once every ten minutes from the official sources of data.
Add this Text-Only Monitor to YOUR site
I have drawn up a way to display this Solar Monitor on your web site without having to have access to cgi scripting or server side includes. Copy this code into your page:
Right-click in the text box to select all, then copy the text to your clipboard. Paste it into your Web document. If you want, you can run this code from a Tryit Editor at www.w3schools.com. Replace everything inside the body tags in the left pane and watch it work.
For it to work right in Internet Explorer, I have chosen to use the iframe tag. For all other browsers, the object tag is used as was intended by the Web Standards committee.
See it in action:
The content below is unchanged during this rewrite of Sunday, March 18, 2007.
Another Solar Activity page -- NB6Z - Propagation Tools
By Larry Kuck, WB7CRK
This site reports the N3KL Solar Activity Monitor in text format, since August 3, 2006.
This page is updated from www.n3kl.org as of no more than three minutes ago. It provides Solar Activity status in text format rather than images, for greater accessibility to people with visual handicaps. For the first time, screen readers will render the status for the blind. The text can be zoomed on your browser, with Netscape and Firefox having greater zoom capability than Internet Explorer with its five settings ranging from smallest to largest.
This page contains no HTML color formatting. All colors, including the status reports are declared in the style sheets. If need be, Internet Explorer users may choose to ignore colors, font styles or font sizes, specified on Web pages by going to Tools > Internet Options > General tab > Accessibility button. Firefox users may simply turn off page styles on the View menu.
I have used some suggestions from "ChrisHunt" and "PaulTEG," members of the CGI programming discussion forum at www.tek-tips.com, and hereby credit them with getting me started.
Not too technical
NOAA solar observation data is gathered by the N3KL web site, and the site offers to the world its N3KL Solar Monitor. The typical Solar Monitor displays two word-images which are updated every ten minutes. These images are displayed fresh from N3KL's web site each time a page containing the Solar Monitor is loaded onto the visitor's screen.
A script program that I wrote in August 2006, is triggered each time a page on this site is loaded, and it checks to see if it has run within the past three minutes. If not, it launches a Web browser that visits n3kl.org and obtains the Solar X-Ray image. The image is examined at Byte 114, which I have determined contains a unique number in each of the images sent out from the n3kl Web site.
The script matches the byte value against a list of values and prints the corresponding word or phrase to a text file on the hard drive. It then launches another Web browser and retrieves the Geomagnet field image and does the same thing with it.
In addition to the plain-text language, the script also writes to disk an HTML snippet that contains a set of <span> tags surrounding the status language, with an appropriate style sheet call. When all the dust settles, there will be four files written to disk, two each in plain text and two in rich text.
Now how is it that you can see Solar Monitor Status in search engine results for this page? Quite simply put: The power of Server Side Includes is at work on this site. I merely call for the two plain-text files to appear in the page title, and the search engine uses the page title as the hot link to this site.
I then use the two HTML snippets within an <h2> header at the top of this page. If you view the page source, you don't see the server instructions that I put in the page, just the end results.
Solar Monitor updates
Oh, and why a three-minute check? The script checks to see if it has run in the last three minutes so I can feel comfortable in running the script on every page in the site without overtaxing the bandwidth resources of n3kl.org if, say, this site got very busy and started seeing hundreds of hits per day. It will only update once every three minutes even if the script is being run once every second. This is just being a good neighbor.
Therefore, the information may be fresh from the source, or was obtained no more than three minutes ago.
Updated Sunday, February 04, 2007 with a new style and some rewrites.
Solar X-Ray Status markers and what they mean
From the pages of www.n3kl.org
Presented below are the solar X-Ray status markers, as they will appear on this site, and their meanings, lifted from http://www.n3kl.org/sun/status.html:
About the Solar X-Ray Status Monitor
The X-ray Solar status monitor downloads data periodically from the NOAA Space Environment Center FTP server. The previous 24 hours of 5 minute Long-wavelength X-ray data from each satellite (GOES 8 and GOES 10) is analyzed, and an appropriate level of activity for the past 24 hours is assigned as follows
(Definition: The reference, "1.00e-6 W/m^2" means "1 times 10 raised to the -6th power watts per square meter," or one microwatt per square meter of intensity.)
|
Normal | Normal: Solar X-ray flux is quiet (< 1.00e-6 W/m^2) |
|
Active | Active: Solar X-ray flux is active (>= 1.00e-6 W/m^2) |
| M‑Class Flare | M-Class Flare: An M Class flare has occurred (X-ray flux >= 1.00e-5 W/m^2) |
| X-Class Flare | X-Class Flare: An X Class flare has occurred (X-ray flux >= 1.00e-4 W/m^2) |
| MEGA FLARE! | Mega Flare: An unprecedented X-ray event has occurred (X-ray flux >= 1.00e-3 W/m^2) The designation "Mega Flare" was chosen by Kevin Loch when the status monitor was created on March 4, 1999. There is no "official" designation for flares in this range. |
About the Geomagnetic Field Status Monitor
The Geomagnetic Field status monitor downloads data periodically from the NOAA Space Environment Center FTP server. The previous 24 hours of 3 hour Planetary Kp Index data is analyzed and an appropriate level of activity for the past 24 hours is assigned as follows:
(Definition: Kp refers to Kp INDEX. A 3-hourly planetary geomagnetic index of activity generated in Gottingen, Germany, based on the K INDEX from 12 or 13 stations distributed around the world from http://www.sec.noaa.gov/info/glossary.html)
| Quiet | Quiet: the Geomagnetic Field is quiet (Kp < 4) |
| Unsettled | Unsettled: the Geomagnetic Field has been unsettled (Kp=4) |
| STORM! | Storm: A Geomagnetic Storm has occurred (Kp>4) |
There was a Mega Flare event in October 2003
I still have an article on the server, Unprecedented Solar Flares, from October 2003, telling of the time when I witnessed unprecedented solar activity. There is also more information about the N3KL Solar Activity Monitor there.