GEOMETRIC TRIANGULATION OF IMAGING OBSERVATIONS TO TRACK CORONAL MASS EJECTIONS CONTINUOUSLY OUT TO 1 AU

By Ying Liu, J. Davies, Jan Luhmann, A. Vourlidas, S. Bale, R. Lin. 2010

190 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We describe a geometric triangulation technique, based on time–elongation maps constructed from imaging observations, to track coronal mass ejections (CMEs) continuously in the heliosphere and predict their impact on the Earth. Taking advantage of stereoscopic imaging observations from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, this technique can determine the propagation direction and radial distance of CMEs from their birth in the corona all the way to 1 AU. The efficacy of the method is demonstrated by its application to the 2008 December 12 CME, which manifests as a magnetic cloud (MC) from in situ measurements at the Earth. The predicted arrival time and radial velocity at the Earth are well confirmed by the in situ observations around the MC. Our method reveals non-radial motions and velocity changes of the CME over large distances in the heliosphere. It also associates the flux-rope structure measured in situ with the dark cavity of the CME in imaging observations. Implementation of the technique, which is expected to be a routine possibility in the future, may indicate a substantial advance in CME studies as well as space weather forecasting.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca3a7f8588e0be69f666943e339d0eb386ce73d2

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. M. Temmer
2. N. Lugaz
3. W. Manchester IV
4. J. Davies
5. A. Thernisien
6. B. Vršnak
7. C. Farrugia
8. A. Vourlidas

Citations in the corpus

• RECONSTRUCTING CORONAL MASS EJECTIONS WITH COORDINATED IMAGING AND IN SITU OBSERVATIONS: GLOBAL STRUCTURE, KINEMATICS, AND IMPLICATIONS FOR SPACE WEATHER FORECASTING (2010, methodology): “Combined together these cameras can image a CME from its birth in the corona all the way to the Earth and beyond (see Liu et al. 2009a, 2010, and the animations online).”
• CONNECTING SPEEDS, DIRECTIONS AND ARRIVAL TIMES OF 22 CORONAL MASS EJECTIONS FROM THE SUN TO 1 AU (2014, methodology): “There is an error associated with manual measurements of CME fronts in J-maps, which is on the order of ±0.5◦ in elongation angle ǫ(t) (Williams et al. 2009; Liu et al. 2010a; Möstl et al. 2011).”
• THE DEFLECTION OF THE TWO INTERACTING CORONAL MASS EJECTIONS OF 2010 MAY 23–24 AS REVEALED BY COMBINED IN SITU MEASUREMENTS AND HELIOSPHERIC IMAGING (2012, methodology): “For these reasons, we rely on stereoscopic methods: triangulation (see Liu et al. 2010a), which is based on the Fixed-Φ (FΦ) geometry; and tangent-to-a-sphere method (see Lugaz et al. 2010), which is based on the Harmonic Mean (HM) geometry.”
• Ensemble Modeling of CMEs Using the WSA–ENLIL+Cone Model (2015, methodology): “The algorithm is most similar to the CME geometric triangulation method of Liu et al. (2010).”
• ON SUN-TO-EARTH PROPAGATION OF CORONAL MASS EJECTIONS (2013, methodology): “In conjunction with imaging observations, it provides a larger spatial perspective of ICMEs than one-dimensional in situ measurements (Liu et al. 2010b).”
• The Physical Processes of CME/ICME Evolution (2017, methodology): “…largely intact, and careful examination suggests that they can be connected to the magnetic structures observed at 1 AU (e.g., Yurchyshyn et al. 2007; Démoulin 2008; Möstl et al. 2008; Davis et al. 2009; Liu et al. 2010a,b, 2011; Howard and DeForest 2012; Manchester et al. 2014a; Hu et al. 2016).”