Research Highlights

Stratosphere sudden warmings (SSWs) are strong disturbances in the high latitude, wintertime, stratospheric polar vortex. The effects of SSWs are, however, not limited to the stratosphere, and SSWs influence the whole atmosphere, including tropospheric weather, chemistry and dynamics of the middle atmosphere, and the near-Earth space environment.

Solar flares—a sudden eruption of electromagnetic radiation at the Sun—are known to have significant impacts on Earth’s upper atmosphere and ionosphere, but their collective effects on geospace as an integrated system have never been examined.

We conducted observational and modeling studies of thermospheric composition and ionospheric total electron content (TEC) variations during two geomagnetically quiet periods (maximum Kp=1.7) at solar minimum. 

We perform a detailed theoretical study of the atomic structure of ions with ns2npm ground configurations and focus on departures from LS coupling which directly affect the Land ́e g factors of magnetic dipole lines between levels of the ground terms.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Global-scale observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission observed a unique structure of thermospheric column density ratio of O to N2 (∑O/N2) during a geomagnetic storm on day of year (DOY) 130 (May 10) to DOY 132 in 2019. The percentage difference of ∑O/N2 between the storm time (DOY 131) and the quiet time (DOY 128) had a relatively enhanced ∑O/N2 region sandwiched by two depleted regions over North America and the Atlantic Ocean in the Northern Hemisphere.

We take a broad look at the problem of identifying the magnetic solar causes of space weather. The challenges are best met through a combination of near UV lines of bright Mg II, and lines of Fe II and Fe I (mostly within the 4s − 4p transition array) which form in the chromosphere up to 20,000 K.

The neutral winds in the Mesosphere and Lower Thermosphere (MLT) region have been observed at King Sejong Station, Antarctica using a meteor radar and a Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) simultaneously. These two independent MLT wind measurements are compared to each other to identify the characteristics of FPI measurement.

Kelvin waves are large scale wave that is important for Earth’s atmosphere. The Ultra-Fast Kelvin waves (UFKW) are a subset of the Kelvin waves that can propagate to the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) ~100km and above due to their high zonal phase speeds. 

The bulk of the emission from the plasma called "transition region" plasma originates from structures energetically connected both to the chromosphere and corona. This result resolves decades of debate and opens the door to measuring magnetic energy and its evolution in the corona using transition region emission lines.