The Evolution of Solar Storms in the Inner Heliosphere
The goal of this project is to enhance our understanding of how solar storms move and expand in the solar wind between the Sun and the Earth. This is directly related to our capability to forecast their potentially disastrous consequences at Earth in real time.
These storms, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), are expelled from the Sun’s outermost layer with enormous speeds of up to 3000 kilometers per second, and may reach Earth in one to five days. They are the source of the strongest disturbances of the Earth’s magnetosphere, and a “super CME event” may pose a great threat to our modern technological infrastructure, in particular to satellites in Earth orbit, flight crews on polar routes, and power grids on the ground.
Thus, a strong incentive exists to check the validity of the results provided by various CME models. However, there has been a lack of verification of these results with multi-point in situ data of CMEs. This project aims at filling this gap.
We pursue one main goal: to understand the propagation and shape of coronal mass ejections in the inner heliosphere. To this end, we define two working packages (WPs): in WP1 (METHOD DEVELOPMENT), new techniques are developed to model the evolution of CMEs with NASA/STEREO images. In WP2 (CME PROPAGATION AND PREDICTION), we will evaluate these model results and their predictions with multi-point in situ data of CMEs to determine their physical characteristics, such as their global shape, 3D-orientation, and kinematics. We will use data provided by the heliospheric network of suitable space probes currently operating: MESSENGER at Mercury, Venus Express at Venus, ACE/Wind at Earth, and STEREO-A/B in the solar wind. The results will be powerful software packages and analyses on CME evolution and their global shape, published in international peer-reviewed journals, and they will provide inputs for efforts on real time space weather prediction.
Importantly, newly developed methods and results will also contribute to our understanding of the influence of CMEs on the atmospheres and magnetospheres of the terrestrial planets. Furthermore, the Solar Orbiter and Solar Probe Plus missions are currently designed and will approach the Sun closer than ever before by the end of the decade. The know-how of Austrian research in these fields, fostered in this project, will form a basis for the involvement in these future, promising missions.