Research Highlights

Published: December 2024. Sarah Gibson, et al. present an analysis of a CME and its interior structure observed during the seventh solar encounter of the Parker Solar Probe, utilizing the data from its Wide-Field Imager for Solar PRobe (WISPR) heliospheric imager. They observe a complex CME structure consisting of non-concentric nested rings, which we argue is a signature of the embedded helical magnetic flux rope (MFR) of the CME.

Kun Wu, Liying Qian, Wenbin Wang, Xuguang Cai, and Joseph Mclnerney conduct an in-depth analysis of Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model-eXtended (WACCM-X) simulations to examine physical mechanisms of the formation and evolution of an equatorial ionization anomaly (EIA) merging phenomenon during a storm on November 4th, 2021. 

In this publication, Roberto Casini and Alfred de Wijn expand on their previous study of the impact of atmospheric seeing on polarization cross-talk, and show how the formalism that was developed in that work can be applied to treat the case of spatial modulators of polarization. 

Han-Li Liu observes that nitric oxide (NO) is one of the most important cooling agent in the thermosphere and an important species for the energy balance of the upper atmosphere and the chemistry and dynamics of the middle atmosphere. 

N. M. Pedatella, K. Wu, L. Qian, and Q. Gan use WACCM-X to investigate the impact of the upward propagating migrating diurnal (DW1) and semidiurnal (SW2) tides on the seasonal variability in the ionosphere and thermosphere. The results demonstrate that the upward propagating DW1 and SW2 both have significant effects on the ionosphere and thermosphere, including influencing the seasonal variability.

Mausumi Dikpati, Bernadett Belucz, Robertus Erdelyi, Peter A Gilman, Scott W McIntosh and Breno Raphaldini find that latitude-location, latitude-separation, and amplitude of the  toroidal magnetic field bands strongly influence the latitudinal structure and growth rates of the unstable modes, of both symmetries about the equator. These properties can lead to 'teleconnections' between low- and high-latitudes in each hemisphere and across the equator. 

Robert Jarolim, Astrid M. Veronig, Stefan Purkhart, Peijin Zhang, and Matthias Rempel provide a detailed record of the magnetic field evolution of AR 13664, now publicly available for further research. Their results show that drops in free magnetic energy coincide with large solar flares, and that all modeled X-class flares were associated with a sudden decrease in magnetic energy.

Breno Raphaldini, Mausumi Dikpati, Scott W. McIntosh, and Andre S. W. Teruya, utilize 3 years of global, synchronous observations of coronal bright point densities to obtain empirical signatures of dispersion relations that can be attributed to the simulated waves in tachocline. By tracking the bright point densities at selected latitudes, they compute their wave-number X frequency spectra. 

Yuhong Fan, Maria Kazachenko, Andrei Afanasev, and George Fisher present a boundary data-driven magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) simulation of the 2011-02-15 coronal mass ejection (CME) event of Active Region (AR) NOAA 11158. The simulation is driven at the lower boundary with an electric field derived from the normal magnetic field and the vertical electric current measured from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Helioseismic Magnetic Imager (HMI) vector magnetograms.