Research Highlights

Tingting Yu, Wenbin Wang, Zhipeng Ren, and Jia Yue use TIMED/GUVI limb measurements of FUV airglow emission to investigate thermospheric composition and temperature responses to the 20-21 November 2003 (day of year (DOY) 324 and 325) superstorm. The storm-time composition and temperature responses were global and evolved continuously as the storm progressed.

A. Maute, A.D. Richmond, G. Lu, D. Knipp, Y. Shi, B. Anderson assert that the magnetosphere-ionosphere (MI) coupling is crucial in modeling the thermosphere-ionosphere (TI) response to geomagnetic activity. They introduce a new method  using observed FAC and solve for the interhemispherically asymmetric electric potential distribution. 

A.N. Afanasyev, M.D. Kazachenko, Y. Fan, G.H. Fisher, and B. Tremblay further validate the PDFI SS method, using approximately one–hour long MHD simulation data of magnetic flux emergence from the upper convection zone into the solar atmosphere. They reconstruct photo- spheric electric fields and calculate the Poynting flux, and compare those to the actual values from the simulations.

Qian Wu, Wenbin Wang, Dong Lin, Chaosong Huang, and Yongliang Zhang use the newly developed, Multiscale Atmosphere-Geospace Environment (MAGE) model to simulate the penetrating electric field in the equatorial region under different interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) BZ conditions during September 2020.

Alin R. Paraschiv, Alina C. Donea, and Philip G. Judge present comprehensive observations of recurrent active region coronal jets, and derive their thermal and non-thermal properties. We discuss a peculiar penumbral magnetic reconnection site, which we previously identified as a "Coronal Geyser".

Dr. Nick Pedatella asserts that the advancement of whole atmosphere models has contributed to understanding the significant role terrestrial weather has on generating variability in the ionosphere-thermosphere.

T. A. Siddiqui, Y. Yamazaki, C. Stolle, A. Maute, J. Lastovicka , I. K. Edemskiy, Z. Mosna investigated the variations of the TEC over Europe during two northern hemisphere SSWs events in 2009 and 2019 examining the dominant drivers and their respective contributions to TEC changes during both SSW events.

In the solar corona, the free energy, i.e., the excess in magnetic energy over a ground-state potential field, forms the reservoir of energy that can be released during solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Marcel F. Corchado-Albelo, Kévin Dalmasse, Sarah Gibson, Yuhong Fan, and Anna Malanushenko investigate the possibility of exploiting such observations for mapping and studying the accumulation and release of coronal free magnetic energy, with the goal of developing a new tool for identifying "hot spots" of coronal free energy such as those associated with twisted and/or sheared coronal magnetic fields.

E. Wright, D. Przybylski, M. Rempel, C. Miller, S. Suresh, S. Su, R. Loft and S. Chandrasekaran present challenges and strategies to accelerate a multi-physics, multi-band MURaM using a directive-based programming model, OpenACC in order to maintain a single source code across CPUs and GPUs.