Stan Solomon presented a NCAR Explorer Series lecture about how the aurora is formed and varies with the solar wind driver. In this public outreach lecture Stan delves into the physics and chemistry of the ionosphere.
The High Altitude Observatory is proud to acknowledge Dr. Gang Lu for being among the 2020 class of AGU Fellows, just recently announced. Gang is a Senior Scientist at HAO. Her primary research interests are in high-latitude ionospheric electrodynamics, solar wind-magnetosphere-ionosphere thermosphere coupling, and space weather.
First author, William Lotko, reveals that the CHAMP satellite orbiting near 400 km altitude near the magnetic cusp routinely traversed thermospheric density enhancements (up to 50%) that are not predicted by empirical models.
Coronal Holes present the source of the fast solar wind. However, the fast solar wind is not unimodal—there are discrete, but subtle, compositional, velocity, and density structures that differentiate different coronal holes as well as wind streams that originate within one coronal hole.
The present investigation evaluates the assimilation of synthetic data which has properties similar to actual Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) level-2 (L2) and other conventional lower atmospheric observations.
View videos of past colloquia