The Physical Processes of CME/ICME Evolution

By W. Manchester IV, E. Kilpua, Ying D. Liu, N. Lugaz, Pete Riley, Tibor Török, B. Vršnak. 2017

235 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As observed in Thomson-scattered white light, coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are manifest as large-scale expulsions of plasma magnetically driven from the corona in the most energetic eruptions from the Sun. It remains a tantalizing mystery as to how these erupting magnetic fields evolve to form the complex structures we observe in the solar wind at Earth. Here, we strive to provide a fresh perspective on the post-eruption and interplanetary evolution of CMEs, focusing on the physical processes that define the many complex interactions of the ejected plasma with its surroundings as it departs the corona and propagates through the heliosphere. We summarize the ways CMEs and their interplanetary CMEs (ICMEs) are rotated, reconfigured, deformed, deflected, decelerated and disguised during their journey through the solar wind. This study then leads to consideration of how structures originating in coronal eruptions can be connected to their far removed interplanetary counterparts. Given that ICMEs are the drivers of most geomagnetic storms (and the sole driver of extreme storms), this work provides a guide to the processes that must be considered in making space weather forecasts from remote observations of the corona.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6eaeb2ce363f795f7728a255ee98e3481ed11c19

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. S. Gibson
2. Pete Riley
3. S. Cranmer
4. E. Kilpua
5. A. Balogh
6. Ying Liu
7. David H. Boteler
8. R. Steiger

Citations in the corpus

• Geoeffective Properties of Solar Transients and Stream Interaction Regions (2017, background): “What we observe in-situ is determined by intrinsic CME properties, the evolution and interaction of the CME with the ambient solar wind (see Manchester et al. 2017, this issue, and the references therein), and the path the observing spacecraft (and the Earth) makes through the ICME.”
• A 21st Century View of the March 1989 Magnetic Storm (2019, background): “The CMEs erupting from the Sun evolve as they travel through the interplanetary medium to become the ICME seen at 1 AU (see review by Manchester et al., 2017; Kilpua et al., 2019).”
• Origins of the Ambient Solar Wind: Implications for Space Weather (2017, background): “In this issue, related reviews of the space weather impacts of CMEs and other transient forcing events include Manchester et al. (2017), Green et al. (2017), Eastwood et al. (2017), McPherron et al. (2017), Lester et al. (2017), and Sojka et al. (2017).”