Research Highlights

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. 

Ian Hewins, Sarah Gibson, David Webb, Bob McFadden, Thomas Kuchar, and Barbara Emery-Geiger use the McIntosh Archive of solar features to analyze the evolution of coronal holes over more than three solar cycles. They demonstrate that coronal hole positions and lifetimes change dramatically on time scales from months to yrs, and that the pattern of these changes is clearly linked to the solar activity cycle.

Sarah Gibson, Philip Judge, Mark Rast, Nazaret Bello Gonzalez, Luis Bellot Rubio, and others assert that the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) will revolutionize our ability to measure, understand and model the basic physical processes that control the structure and dynamics of the Sun and its atmosphere.

Andreea-Clara Pricopi, Alin Razvan Paraschiv, Diana Besliu-Ionescu, and Anca-Nicoleta Marginean state, in the Astrophysical Journal, that coronal mass ejections are the most important space weather phenomena, being associated with large geomagnetic storms, and having the potential to cause disturbances to telecommunications, satellite network disruptions, and power grid damage and failures.

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.