Considerable progress for the study of solar corona physics has been achieved by China's space physics community. It involves the theoretical study of coronal process of solar active phenomena, solar wind origin, acceleration of solar wind and coronal mass ejections, observational and numerical study of these problems and prediction methods of solar eruptive activities (such as flares/CMEs). Here is a brief summary of the progress in this area. Main progress is put upon the following three topics: corona and solar wind, numerical method, prediction method.
Using 80 CME-ICME events during 1997.1―2002.9, based on the eruptive source locations of CMEs and solar magnetic field observation at the photosphere, a current sheet magnetic coordinate (CMC) system is established in order to study the propagation of CME and its geoeffectiveness. In context of this coordinate system, the effect of the eruptive source location and the form of heliospheric current sheet (HCS) at the eruptive time of CME on the geomagnetic storm intensity caused by CME and the CME’s transit time at the Earth is investigated in detail. Our preliminary conclusions are: 1) The geomagnetic disturbances caused by CMEs tend to have the so-called “same side-opposite side effect”, i.e. CMEs erupt from the same side of the HCS as the earth would be more likely to arrive at the earth and the geomagnetic disturbances associated with them tend to be of larger magnitude, while CMEs erupting from the opposite side would arrive at the earth with less probability and the corresponding geomagnetic disturbance magnitudes would be relatively weaker. 2) The angular separation between the earth and the HCS affect the corresponding disturbance intensity. That is, when our earth is located near the HCS, adverse space weather events occur most probably. 3) The erupting location of the CME and its nearby form of HCS will also affect its arrival time at the earth. According to these conclusions, in this context of CMC coordinate we arrive at new prediction method for estimating the geomagnetic storm intensity (Dstmin) caused by CMEs and their transit times. The application of the empirical model for 80 CME-ICME events shows that the relative error of Dst is within 30% for 59% events with Dstmin≤?50 nT, while the averaged absolute error of transit time is lower than 10 h for all events.
ZHAO Xinhua1,2 & FENG Xueshang1,3 1. SIGMA Weather Group, Key Laboratory of Space Weather, Center for Space Science and Applied Re-search, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China
Aiming at two intense shock events on October 28 and 29, 2003, this paper presents a two-step method, which combines synoptic analysis of space weather ——“observing” and quantitative prediction ——“palpating”, and then uses it to test predictions. In the first step of “observing”, on the basis of observations of the solar source surface magnetic field, interplanetary scintillation (IPS) and ACE spacecraft, we find that the propagation of the shocks is asymmetric relative to the normal direction of their solar sources, and the Earth is located near the direction of the fastest speed and the greatest energy of the shocks. As the two fast ejection shock events, the fast explosion of coronal mass of the extremely high temperature, the strong magnetic field, and the high speed background solar wind are also helpful to their rapid propagation. In the second step of “palpating”, we adopt a new membership function of the fast shock events for the ISF method. The predicted results show that for the onset time of the geomagnetic disturbance, the relative errors between the observational and the predicted results are 1.8% and 6.7%; and for the magnetic disturbance magnitude, the relative errors are 4.1% and 3.1%, re- spectively. Furthermore, the comparison among the predicted results of our two-step method with those of five other prevailing methods shows that the two-step method is advantageous. The results tell us that understanding the physical features of shock propagation thoroughly is of great importance in improving the prediction precision.
XIE Yanqiong1, 2, 3, WEI Fengsi1, FENG Xueshang1 & ZHONG Dingkun1, 2 1. State Key Laboratory of Space Weather, Center for Space Science and Applied Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China
Based on the WIND observational data for the plasma waves from thermal noise receptor (TNR) working on the frequency 4―256 kHz and the solar wind and the magnetic fields, we analyze the plasma wave activities in the 60 magnetic cloud’s boundary layers (BLs) and find that there are often various plasma wave activities in the BLs, which are different from those in the adjacent solar wind (SW) and the magnetic clouds (MC). The basic characteris-tics are that: (1) the enhancement of the Langmuir wave near the electronic plasma frequency (fpe) is a dominant wave ac-tivity, which occupies 75% investigated samples; (2) the events enhanced both in the langmuir and ion acustic (f < fpe) waves are about 60% of investigated samples; (3) broadband, continuous enhancement events in the plasma wave activities were observed in the whole frequency band of TNR, and about 30% of the 60 samples, however, were not observed in the SW and the MC investigated events; (4) although the ratio of the temperatures between the electon and proton, Te/Tp≤1, the ion caustic wave enhancement activities are still often observed in the BLs, which makes it difficult to ex- plain them by the traditional plasma theory. New results reported in this paper further show that the magnetic cloud’s BL is an important dynamic structure, which could provide useful diagnosis for understanding the cloud’s BL physics and could expand a space developing space plasma wave theory.
During Ulysses’ first rapid pole-to-pole transit from September 1994 to June 1995, its observations showed that middle- or high-speed solar winds covered all latitudes except those between ?20° and +20° near the ecliptic plane, where the velocity was 300―450 km/s. At poleward 40°, however, only fast solar winds at the speed of 700―870 km/s were observed. In addition, the transitions from low-speed wind to high-speed wind or vice versa were abrupt. In this paper, the large-scale structure of solar wind observed by Ulysses near solar minimum is simulated by using the three-dimensional numerical MHD model. The model com- bines TVD Lax-Friedrich scheme and MacCormack II scheme and decomposes the calculation region into two re- gions: one from 1 to 22 Rs and the other from 18 Rs to 1 AU. Based on the observations of the solar photospheric magnetic field and an addition of the volumetric heating to MHD equations, the large-scale solar wind structure mentioned above is reproduced by using the three-dimensional MHD model and the numerical results are roughly consistent with Ulysses’ observations. Our simulation shows that the initial magnetic field topology and the addition of volume heating may govern the bimodal structure of solar wind observed by Ulysses and also demonstrates that the three-dimensional MHD numerical model used here is efficient in modeling the large-scale solar wind structure.
FENG Xueshang, XIANG Changqing, ZHONG Dingkun & FAN Quanlin SIGMA Weather Group, Key Laboratory of Space Weather
