Research Highlights

Astrid Maute asserts the importance of bringing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts to the forefront of Heliophysics over the next decade and well beyond. This position paper outlines three specific recommendations to make the Heliophysics community more diverse, equitable, and inclusive by improving the accessibility and accountability.

Astrid Maute, et al. assert that biases against marginalized groups and institutions can be mitigated by avoiding heavy-weighting metrics such as h-index and past awards. Progress has been made in recent years thanks to the efforts of the Nominating Task Force and this committee and AGU’s efforts to acknowledge and mitigate implicit biases. However, we must continue to be vigilant and work towards ensuring we recognize all those who are deserving of becoming an AGU fellow.

S. Danilovic, J. P. Bjørgen, J. Leenaarts, and M. Rempel discuss the important role of Rapid blue- and red-shifted events (RBEs/RREs) in mass-loading and heating the solar corona, but their nature and origin are still debatable. They model these features to learn more about their properties, formation and origin.

B. C. Low reviews the two-plate initial boundary-value problem of Parker, treating the relaxation of a 3D magnetic field prescribed with an arbitrary topology to a terminal force-free field in a cold, viscous, electrically perfect fluid-conductor. Anchored by their foot-points at the perfectly conducting rigid plates, the relaxing field preserves its topology.

K. H. Pham, W. Wang, H. Liu, D. Lin, M. Wiltberger, et al. discuss how during geomagnetic storms, increased activity within the geospace environment causes large scale plasma convection to occur and electrons to precipitate into the upper atmosphere. The enhanced heating of the thermosphere by the plasma convection and electron precipitation can produce large perturbations in the neutral density. 

Wenbin Wang, Liying Qian, et. al. investigate the crests variations and associated ionosphere-thermosphere disturbances following the 2022 Tonga Volcano eruption, dramatic suppression and deformation of the equatorial ionization anomaly (EIA) crests occurred in the American sector ∼14,000 km away from the epicenter.

Vanessa Mercea, Alin Razvan Paraschiv, Daniela Adriana Lacatus, Anca Marginean, Diana Besliu-Ionescu  introduce an acoustic holography processed dataset constructed from egression-power maps of solar active regions for Solar Cycles 23 and 24. They then present a pedagogical approach to the application of machine learning representation methods for sunquake detection using AutoEncoders, Contrastive Learning, Object Detection and recurrent techniques, which we enhance by introducing several custom domain-specific data augmentation transformations.

Astrid Maute et. al., following the two-year prime mission of the NASA Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) mission collected a key set of in-situ and remote sensing measurements that are, by virtue of a detailed mission design, uniquely comparable, ICON provides for new investigations of the mechanisms that control the behavior of the ionosphere-thermosphere system under both geomagnetically quiet and active conditions.

N.M. Pedatella and J.L. Anderson present study investigates the impact of assimilating electron density profiles from the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate-2 (COSMIC-2) mission in a whole atmosphere data assimilation system. The observations are assimilated into the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model with thermosphere-ionosphere eXtension (WACCMX) using the Data Assimilation Research Testbed (DART) ensemble adjustment Kalman filter.