Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Jerome van der Linden, who writes:
For some time, I have subscribed to a service that alerts me via email when our weather bureau wants to inform people about the likelihood of aurora activity that might lead to the ability to observe the southern hemisphere auroras, such this example:
SUBJ: ASWFC AURORA OUTLOOK
ISSUED AT 0627 UT ON 31 May 2025
FROM THE AUSTRALIAN SPACE WEATHER FORECASTING CENTRE
A halo CME is expected to impact Earth on 01-Jun at 2100UT +/- 8 hours. This impact is expected to produce auroral activity on 01-02 Jun, with a chance of continued activity on 03-Jun. Warnings and/or alerts will follow if significant geomagnetic activity occurs.
Quite recently, I discovered that the Bureau of Meteorology (“the BOM”) in Australia has, as part of its www.bom.gov.au website, an Australian Space Weather Forecasting Centre: https://www.sws.bom.gov.au/. It has a number of interesting headings (with links) that may be of interest to others in the SW hobby, such as “Solar”;”HF Systems”, and “Products and Services”. With the respect to the last, it would appear that a number of organisations subscribe to services provided by the BOM, including Australian airlines. In addition it seems even Stockholm Radio subscribes to some of the services, and an example of hour by hour HF frequency area prediction is shown in these graphs:
There’s far too much for me to review on this website, so I suggest interested SWLers may care to have a look for themselves, as there’s a lot of information there, which is updated regularly.
As a minor update to my original post, note that some useful information may be gained by “drilling down” through the information. EG if you go down to Client Support under SWS, select Qantas, and download a daily or monthly HAP chart, you will quickly see what frequencies Qantas Dispatch may be contacted on. Today, for example, depending on where the flight is located, the map / areas displayed show locations with numbers 1 through 7, and each of these relates – for a particular time period – to a specific HF frequency used (eg a flight / plane in area (Channel?) 1 is most likely to use 4687kHz):
Recommended frequency channels for contact with QantasDispatch for the period 8 July, 2025
Channel/frequency(kHz) — 1/ 4687 2/ 6637 3/ 8921 4/10078 5/13342 6/17920 7/21970
Time — UT Note at times another channel may be usable, lack of a suitable channel is indicated by zero.
Jerome
Jerome,
I have suggested on this site that every time there is a solar event but also for predicting the high frequency radio patha worldwide. That comes from https://www.sws.bom.gov.au/Solar/3/1 Location -22.2192143,114.1004537 which Google maps will find.
There education page is also good.
The site used to be able to post images from contributors of images of aurora Australis.