Corotating interaction regions as seen by the STEREO Heliospheric Imagers 2007 – 2010
Date
08/2015Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) mission has coincided with a pronounced solar minimum. This allowed for easier detection of corotating interaction regions (CIRs). CIRs are formed by the interaction between fast and slow solar-wind streams ejected from source regions on the solar surface that rotate with the Sun. High-density plasma blobs that have become entrained at the stream interface can be tracked out to large elongations in data from the Heliospheric Imager (HI) instruments onboard STEREO. These blobs act as tracers of the CIR itself such that their HI signatures can be used to estimate CIR source location and radial speed. We estimate the kinematic properties of solar-wind transients associated with 40 CIRs detected by the HI instrument onboard the STEREO-A spacecraft between 2007 and 2010. We identify in-situ signatures of these transients at L1 using the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) and compare the in-situ parameters with the HI results. We note that solar-wind transients associated with CIRs appear to travel at or close to the slow solar-wind speed preceding the event as measured in situ. We also highlight limitations in the commonly used analysis techniques of solar-wind transients by considering variability in the solar wind.
Citation
Conlon , T M , Milan , S E , Davies , J A & Williams , A O 2015 , ' Corotating interaction regions as seen by the STEREO Heliospheric Imagers 2007 – 2010 ' , Solar Physics , vol. 290 , no. 8 , pp. 2291-2309 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-015-0759-z
Publication
Solar Physics
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0038-0938Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2015. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
T.M. Conlon and A.O. Williams were supported by an STFC, UK studentship and S.E. Milan was supported by STFC grant ST/K001000/1. Date of Acceptance: 08/08/2015Collections
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