CME OR SOLAR FLARE? Due to hit the 17th & 18th what is the difference?

OK... would you EXPERTS... please explain what's going on tomorrow
and the next day, please? I got this much information... but STREAMS???

A solar wind stream is heading for Earth, and so is a coronal mass ejection (CME). Together,
they add up to a geomagnetic storm alert for March 17th and 18th.

CME OR SOLAR FLARE?

People sometimes confuse CMEs with solar flares, but they are different phenomena.
Solar flares are explosions on the sun
that occur when energy build up around sunspots, becoming so hot -- millions of degrees Fahrenheit --
that they produce a burst of electromagnetic radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum,
from radio waves to x-rays and gamma rays.
that occur when energy build up around sunspots, becoming so hot -- millions of degrees Fahrenheit --
that they produce a burst of electromagnetic radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum,
from radio waves to x-rays and gamma rays.

Solar flares take place in the solar corona and chromosphere, heating plasma to tens of millions of kelvins
and accelerating the resulting electrons, protons and heavier ions to near the speed of light.

They produce electromagnetic radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum at all wavelengths
from long-wave radio to the shortest wavelength gamma rays.

Most flares occur around sunspots, where intense magnetic fields emerge from the Sun's surface into
the corona.

The energy efficiency associated with solar flares may take several hours or even days to build up,
but most flares take only a matter of minutes to release their energy..

For more information about the topic Solar flare, read the full article at Wikipedia.org
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CMEs were once thought to be the result of solar flares,
but while they sometimes accompany solar flares, there is no direct relation between the two.
They occur when a large bubble of plasma escapes through a star's corona and travels through space
to the earth at high speeds over the course of several hours.

If a CME collides with the earth,
it can produce a geomagnetic storm, which can cause electrical power outages
and damage communications satellites and electronic equipment.

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Solar flares, on the other hand, affect radio communications.
But... remember.. GAMMA-RAYS... oooooh soooooo DEADLY!
A solar flare is a violent explosion in the Sun's atmosphere with an energy equivalent to tens of millions of hydrogen bombs.
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The solar wind also carries with it the magnetic field of the Sun.
This field will have either a North or South orientation. If the solar wind has energetic bursts,
contracting and expanding the magnetosphere, or if the solar wind takes a southward polarization,
geomagnetic storms can be expected. The southward field causes magnetic reconnection of the
dayside magnetopause, rapidly injecting magnetic and particle energy into the Earth's magnetosphere.

During a geomagnetic storm, the ionosphere's F2 layer will become unstable, fragment, and may
even disappear. In the northern and southern pole regions of the Earth, auroras will be observable
in the sky.