Research Highlights

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.

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.

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.

Coronal loops, seen in solar coronal images, are believed to represent emission from magnetic flux tubes with compact cross sections. Anna Malanushenko, Matthias Rempel and others, examine the 3D structure of plasma above an active region in a radiative magnetohydrodynamic simulation to locate volume counterparts for coronal loops.

Alin Paraschiv and Philip Judge present CLEDB, a single point inversion algorithm for determining magnetic parameters using spectro-polarimetric measurements of emission lines formed in the solar corona.

This paper identifies spectral lines from EUV to infrared wavelengths which are optimally suited to measuring vector magnetic fields as high as possible in the solar atmosphere.

Rebecca Centeno, Matthias Rempel, Roberto Casini, and Tanausu del Pino Aleman study the effects of finite spectral resolution on the magnetic field values retrieved through the weak field approximation (WFA) from the cores of the Mg II h&k lines.