Solar source of the largest geomagnetic storm of cycle 23

By Nat Gopalswamy, S. Yashiro, G. Michałek, Hong Xie, R. Lepping, R. Howard. 2005

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The largest geomagnetic storm of solar cycle 23 occurred on 2003 November 20 with a Dst index of −472 nT, due to a coronal mass ejection (CME) from active region 0501. The CME near the Sun had a sky‐plane speed of ∼1660 km/s, but the associated magnetic cloud (MC) arrived with a speed of only 730 km/s. The MC at 1 AU (ACE Observations) had a high magnetic field (∼56 nT) and high inclination to the ecliptic plane. The southward component of the MC's magnetic field was made up almost entirely of its axial field because of its east‐south‐west (ESW) chirality. We suggest that the southward pointing strong axial field of the MC reconnected with Earth's front‐side magnetic field, resulting in the largest storm of the solar cycle 23.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/72305f196fcebb0c59420f48e0a221727942aa7d

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Nat Gopalswamy
2. S. Yashiro
3. R. Howard
4. A. Vourlidas
5. S. Akiyama
6. P. Mäkelä
7. M. Temmer
8. Guillermo Stenborg

Citations in the corpus

• Interplanetary conditions leading to superintense geomagnetic storms (Dst ≤ −250 nT) during solar cycle 23 (2008, background): “[9] Figure 2 shows the interplanetary and Dst data for the largest geomagnetic storm of solar cycle 23, the event during November 20 2003 [ Gopalswamy et al., 2005; Huttunen et al., 2005; Gonzalez et al., 2007].”
• Type II radio bursts and energetic solar eruptions (2003, methodology): “This is higher than the mass of an average CME (6.9 1014 g) [see Gopalswamy et al., 2005b] by a factor of 3.”
• The SOHO/LASCO CME Catalog (2009, background): “CMEs can also be deflected by other CMEs and by nearby coronal holes (Gopalswamy et al. 2005a).”
• CME interactions with coronal holes and their interplanetary consequences (2009, background): “Such deflections can move a CME closer to the Sun-Earth line [ Gopalswamy et al., 2005a ] or away from it [Gopalswamy et al., 2004] depending on the relative location of the CH and the CME source with respect to the observer.”
• Geoeffectiveness of halo coronal mass ejections (2007, background): “Occasionally, the flux rope axes may be highly inclined to the ecliptic plane and cause either very intense storms [Gopalswamy et al., 2005a] or no storm at all [Yurchyshyn et al., 2001] depending on which way the axial field is pointed.”
• Coronal mass ejections and other extreme characteristics of the 2003 October–November solar eruptions (2005, background): “This region produced CMEs of moderate energy; one of them on 18 November 2003 produced the largest geomagnetic storm of cycle 23 [ Gopalswamy et al., 2005a ] due to the high inclination of the resulting magnetic cloud.”