Research Highlights

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 Aatiya Ali, Alin Razvan Paraschiv, Kevin Reardon, and Philip Judge, assert that the infrared solar spectrum contains a wealth of physical data about the Sun and is being explored using modern detectors and technology with new ground-based solar telescopes. One such instrument will be the ground-based Cryogenic Near-IR Spectro-Polarimeter of the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope.

Coronal loops, seen in solar coronal images, are believed to represent emission from magnetic flux tubes with compact cross sections. Anna Malanushenko, Matthias Rempel and others, examine the 3D structure of plasma above an active region in a radiative magnetohydrodynamic simulation to locate volume counterparts for coronal loops.

Alin Paraschiv and Philip Judge present CLEDB, a single point inversion algorithm for determining magnetic parameters using spectro-polarimetric measurements of emission lines formed in the solar corona.

This paper identifies spectral lines from EUV to infrared wavelengths which are optimally suited to measuring vector magnetic fields as high as possible in the solar atmosphere.

Rebecca Centeno, Matthias Rempel, Roberto Casini, and Tanausu del Pino Aleman study the effects of finite spectral resolution on the magnetic field values retrieved through the weak field approximation (WFA) from the cores of the Mg II h&k lines.

This paper compares new observations from the Global-scale Observations of Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission of molecular oxygen (O2) in the lower thermosphere (130 - 200 km in altitude) to widely used models in the aeronomy community.

Scattering polarization tends to dominate the linear polarization signals of the Ca II 8542 A line in weakly magnetized areas, especially when the observing geometry is close to the limb. In this paper we evaluate the degree of applicability of existing non-LTE spectral line inversion codes at inferring the magnetic field vector and, particularly, its transverse component.

Numerical simulations using the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) thermosphere-ionosphere-electrodynamics general circulation model (TIE-GCM) are performed to elucidate the effects of the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) on the middle thermosphere composition during a “geomagnetically quiet” period.