No Arabic abstract
The interaction of multiple Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) has been observed by LASCO coronagraphs and by near-Earth spacecraft, and it is thought to be an important cause of geo-effective storms, large Solar Energetic Particles events and intense Type II radio bursts. New and future missions such as STEREO, the LWS Sentinels, and the Solar Orbiter will provide additional observations of the interaction of multiple CMEs between the Sun and the Earth. We present the results of simulations of two and more CMEs interacting in the inner heliosphere performed with the Space Weather Modeling Framework (SWMF). Based on those simulations, we discuss the observational evidence of the interaction of multiple CMEs, both in situ and from coronagraphs. The clearest evidence of the interaction of the CMEs are the large temperature in the sheath, due to the shocks merging, and the brightness increase in coronagraphic images, associated with the interaction of the leading edges. The importance of having multiple satellites at different distances and angular positions from the Sun is also discussed.
The magnetic fields of interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs), which originate close to the Sun in the form of a flux rope, determine their geoeffectiveness. Therefore, robust flux rope-based models of CMEs are required to perform magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations aimed at space weather predictions. We propose a modified spheromak model and demonstrate its applicability to CME simulations. In this model, such properties of a simulated CME as the poloidal and toroidal magnetic fluxes, and the helicity sign can be controlled with a set of input parameters. We propose a robust technique for introducing CMEs with an appropriate speed into a background, MHD solution describing the solar wind in the inner heliosphere. Through a parametric study, we find that the speed of a CME is much more dependent on its poloidal flux than on the toroidal flux. We also show that the CME speed increases with its total energy, giving us control over its initial speed. We further demonstrate the applicability of this model to simulations of CME-CME collisions. Finally, we use this model to simulate the 12 July 2012 CME and compare the plasma properties at 1 AU with observations. The predicted CME properties agree reasonably with observational data.
The solar wind proton temperature at 1-au has been found to be correlated with small-scale intermittent magnetic structures, i.e., regions with enhanced temperature are associated with coherent structures such as current sheets. Using Parker Solar Probe data from the first encounter, we study this association using measurements of radial proton temperature, employing the Partial Variance of Increments (PVI) technique to identify intermittent magnetic structures. We observe that the probability density functions of high-PVI events have higher median temperatures than those with lower PVI, The regions in space where PVI peaks were also locations that had enhanced temperatures when compared with similar regions suggesting a heating mechanism in the young solar wind that is associated with intermittency developed by a nonlinear turbulent cascade.n the immediate vicinity.
We present a statistical analysis of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) imaged by the Heliospheric Imager (HI) instruments aboard NASAs twin-spacecraft STEREO mission between April 2007 and August 2017 for STEREO-A and between April 2007 and September 2014 for STEREO-B. The analysis exploits a catalogue that was generated within the FP7 HELCATS project. Here, we focus on the observational characteristics of CMEs imaged in the heliosphere by the inner (HI-1) cameras. More specifically, in this paper we present distributions of the basic observational parameters - namely occurrence frequency, central position angle (PA) and PA span - derived from nearly 2000 detections of CMEs in the heliosphere by HI-1 on STEREO-A or STEREO-B from the minimum between Solar Cycles 23 and 24 to the maximum of Cycle 24; STEREO-A analysis includes a further 158 CME detections from the descending phase of Cycle 24, by which time communication with STEREO-B had been lost. We compare heliospheric CME characteristics with properties of CMEs observed at coronal altitudes, and with sunspot number. As expected, heliospheric CME rates correlate with sunspot number, and are not inconsistent with coronal rates once instrumental factors/differences in cataloguing philosophy are considered. As well as being more abundant, heliospheric CMEs, like their coronal counterparts, tend to be wider during solar maximum. Our results confirm previous coronagraph analyses suggesting that CME launch sites dont simply migrate to higher latitudes with increasing solar activity. At solar minimum, CMEs tend to be launched from equatorial latitudes while, at maximum, CMEs appear to be launched over a much wider latitude range; this has implications for understanding the CME/solar source association. Our analysis provides some supporting evidence for the systematic dragging of CMEs to lower latitude as they propagate outwards.
Jovian electrons serve as an important test-particle distribution in the inner heliosphere and have been used extensively in the past to study the (diffusive) transport of cosmic rays in the inner heliosphere. With new limits on the Jovian source function (i.e. the particle intensity just outside the Jovian magnetosphere), and a new set of in-situ observations at 1 AU for both cases of good and poor magnetic connection between the source and observer, we revisit some of these earlier simulations. We aim to find the optimal numerical set-up that can be used to simulate the propagation of 6 MeV Jovian electrons in the inner heliosphere. Using such a set-up, we further aim to study the residence (propagation) times of these particles for different levels of magnetic connection between Jupiter and an observer at Earth (1 AU). Using an advanced Jovian electron propagation model based on the stochastic differential equation (SDE) approach, we calculate the Jovian electron intensity for different model parameters. A comparison with observations leads to an optimal numerical set-up, which is then used to calculate the so-called residence (propagation) times of these particles. Comparing to in-situ observations, we are able to derive transport parameters that are appropriate to study the propagation of 6 MeV Jovian electrons in the inner heliosphere. Moreover, using these values, we show that the method of calculating the residence time applied in former literature is not suited to being interpreted as the propagation time of physical particles. This is due to an incorrect weighting of the probability distribution. We propose and apply a new method, where the results from each pseudo-particle are weighted by its resulting phase-space density (i.e. the number of physical particles that it represents). Thereby we obtain more reliable estimates for the propagation time.
Observations of magnetic clouds (MCs) are consistent with the presence of flux ropes detected in the solar wind (SW) a few days after their expulsion from the Sun as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Both the textit{in situ} observations of plasma velocity profiles and the increase of their size with solar distance show that MCs are typically expanding structures. The aim of this work is to derive the expansion properties of MCs in the inner heliosphere from 0.3 to 1 AU.We analyze MCs observed by the two Helios spacecraft using textit{in situ} magnetic field and velocity measurements. We split the sample in two subsets: those MCs with a velocity profile that is significantly perturbed from the expected linear profile and those that are not. From the slope of the textit{in situ} measured bulk velocity along the Sun-Earth direction, we compute an expansion speed with respect to the cloud center for each of the analyzed MCs. We analyze how the expansion speed depends on the MC size, the translation velocity, and the heliocentric distance, finding that all MCs in the subset of non-perturbed MCs expand with almost the same non-dimensional expansion rate ($zeta$). We find departures from this general rule for $zeta$ only for perturbed MCs, and we interpret the departures as the consequence of a local and strong SW perturbation by SW fast streams, affecting the MC even inside its interior, in addition to the direct interaction region between the SW and the MC. We also compute the dependence of the mean total SW pressure on the solar distance and we confirm that the decrease of the total SW pressure with distance is the main origin of the observed MC expansion rate. We found that $zeta$ was $0.91pm 0.23$ for non-perturbed MCs while $zeta$ was $0.48pm 0.79$ for perturbed MCs, the larger spread in the last ones being due to the influence of the environment conditions on the expansion.