ESTABLISHING A STEREOSCOPIC TECHNIQUE FOR DETERMINING THE KINEMATIC PROPERTIES OF SOLAR WIND TRANSIENTS BASED ON A GENERALIZED SELF-SIMILARLY EXPANDING CIRCULAR GEOMETRY
Abstract
The twin-spacecraft STEREO mission has enabled simultaneous white-light imaging of the solar corona and inner heliosphere from multiple vantage points. This has led to the development of numerous stereoscopic techniques to investigate the three-dimensional structure and kinematics of solar wind transients such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Two such methods—triangulation and the tangent to a sphere—can be used to determine time profiles of the propagation direction and radial distance (and thereby radial speed) of a solar wind transient as it travels through the inner heliosphere, based on its time-elongation profile viewed by two observers. These techniques are founded on the assumption that the transient can be characterized as a point source (fixed ϕ, FP, approximation) or a circle attached to Sun-center (harmonic mean, HM, approximation), respectively. These geometries constitute extreme descriptions of solar wind transients, in terms of their cross-sectional extent. Here, we present the stereoscopic expressions necessary to derive propagation direction and radial distance/speed profiles of such transients based on the more generalized self-similar expansion (SSE) geometry, for which the FP and HM geometries form the limiting cases; our implementation of these equations is termed the stereoscopic SSE method. We apply the technique to two Earth-directed CMEs from different phases of the STEREO mission, the well-studied event of 2008 December and a more recent event from 2012 March. The latter CME was fast, with an initial speed exceeding 2000 km s−1, and highly geoeffective, in stark contrast to the slow and ineffectual 2008 December CME.
Publication Date
10-24-2013
Journal Title
The Astrophysical Journal
Publisher
IOP
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
J. A. Davies, C. H. Perry, R. M. G. M. Trines, R. A. Harrison, N. Lugaz, C. Möstl5, Y. D. Liu, and K. Steed. ESTABLISHING A STEREOSCOPIC TECHNIQUE FOR DETERMINING THE KINEMATIC PROPERTIES OF SOLAR WIND TRANSIENTS BASED ON A GENERALIZED SELF-SIMILARLY EXPANDING CIRCULAR GEOMETRY. Astrophysical Journal. 777:167-167. 2013