Research Highlights

In the solar corona, the free energy, i.e., the excess in magnetic energy over a ground-state potential field, forms the reservoir of energy that can be released during solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Marcel F. Corchado-Albelo, Kévin Dalmasse, Sarah Gibson, Yuhong Fan, and Anna Malanushenko investigate the possibility of exploiting such observations for mapping and studying the accumulation and release of coronal free magnetic energy, with the goal of developing a new tool for identifying "hot spots" of coronal free energy such as those associated with twisted and/or sheared coronal magnetic fields.

E. Wright, D. Przybylski, M. Rempel, C. Miller, S. Suresh, S. Su, R. Loft and S. Chandrasekaran present challenges and strategies to accelerate a multi-physics, multi-band MURaM using a directive-based programming model, OpenACC in order to maintain a single source code across CPUs and GPUs. 

Ian Hewins, Sarah Gibson, David Webb, Bob McFadden, Thomas Kuchar, and Barbara Emery-Geiger use the McIntosh Archive of solar features to analyze the evolution of coronal holes over more than three solar cycles. They demonstrate that coronal hole positions and lifetimes change dramatically on time scales from months to yrs, and that the pattern of these changes is clearly linked to the solar activity cycle.

J. M. Forbes, X. Zhang, and A. Maute, (2020) use the NCAR thermosphere-ionosphere-electrodynamics general circulation model (TIE-GCM) to conduct numerical experiments that isolate and elucidate a substantial modification of the quasi-6-day wave (Q6DW) above 110 km due to presence of the planetary wave (PW) modulated tidal spectrum.

In this paper, Johnathan Gamaunt, Angelica Berner, Alfred de Wijn, Paul Scowen, and Robert Woodruff, aim to illustrate the flow down of requirements from the mission science objectives to design requirements while also giving an overview of the design developed from the concept study. This mission, funded by NASA, uses the Solar Transition Region UltraViolet Explorer (STRUVE) miniature satellite conceived to study the magnetic field in the solar atmosphere.

Andreea-Clara Pricopi, Alin Razvan Paraschiv, Diana Besliu-Ionescu, and Anca-Nicoleta Marginean state, in the Astrophysical Journal, that coronal mass ejections are the most important space weather phenomena, being associated with large geomagnetic storms, and having the potential to cause disturbances to telecommunications, satellite network disruptions, and power grid damage and failures.

Dong Lin, Wenbin Wang, Viacheslav Merkin, and Chaosong Huang show that solar eruptions of mass and magnetic field can trigger geospace storms. The most well-known storm phenomenon is the aurorae in the Earth's high latitude upper atmosphere. They emphasize how extremely high storm activity levels may have severe adverse effects on human society and infrastructure.

Authors E. J. Bregou, M. K. Hudson, B. T. Kress, M. Qin, and R. S. Selesnick find a long-term increase in measured proton flux over four ~11 year cycles of solar activity. The inner zone proton radiation belt consisting of 10’s to >100 MeV protons trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field is examined from 1980 to mid-2021 using measurements from four NOAA POES satellites.

Authors Aatiya Ali, Alin Razvan Paraschiv, Kevin Reardon, and Philip Judge, assert that the infrared solar spectrum contains a wealth of physical data about the Sun and is being explored using modern detectors and technology with new ground-based solar telescopes. One such instrument will be the ground-based Cryogenic Near-IR Spectro-Polarimeter of the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope.