In the present work we utilize ACE/SWICS in-situ measurements of the properties of the solar wind outside ICMEs in order to determine whether, and to what extent are the solar wind properties affected by the solar cycle. We focus on proton temperatures and densities, ion temperatures and differential speeds, charge state distributions and both relative and absolute elemental abundances. We carry out this work dividing the wind in velocity bins to investigate how winds at different speeds react to the solar cycle. We also repeat this study, when possible, to the subset of SWICS measurements less affected by Coulomb collisions. We find that with the only exception of differential speeds (for which we do not have enough measurements) all wind properties change as a function of the solar cycle. Our results point towards a scenario where both the slow and fast solar wind are accelerated by waves, but originate from different sources (open/closed magnetic structures for the fast/slow wind, respectively) whose relative contribution changes along the solar cycle. We also find that the signatures of heating and acceleration on one side, and of the FIP effect on the other, indicate that wave-based plasma heating, acceleration and fractionation remain active throughout the solar cycle, but decrease their effectiveness in all winds, although the slow wind is much affected than the fast one.
We use ACE/SWICS elemental composition data to compare the variations in solar wind fractionation as measured by SWICS during the last solar maximum (1999-2001), the solar minimum (2006-2009) and the period in which the Genesis spacecraft was collecting solar wind (late 2001 - early 2004). We differentiate our analysis in terms of solar wind regimes (i.e. originating from interstream or coronal hole flows, or coronal mass ejecta). Abundances are normalized to the low-FIP ion magnesium to uncover correlations that are not apparent when normalizing to high-FIP ions. We find that relative to magn…
We identify the coronal sources of the solar winds sampled by the ACE spacecraft during 1999-2008, and examine the in situ solar wind properties as a function of wind sources. The standard two-step mapping technique is adopted to establish the photospheric footpoints of the magnetic flux tubes along which the ACE winds flow. The footpoints are then placed in the context of EIT 284~Å images and photospheric magnetograms, allowing us to categorize the sources into four groups: coronal holes (CHs), active regions (ARs), the quiet Sun (QS), and "Undefined". This practice also enables us to establi…
Non-equilibrium ionization (NEI) is a key process often times neglected when modeling astrophysical plasmas with thermodynamical timescales much shorter than the timescales for ionization and recombination. In this paper, we perform NEI modeling on a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulation of the solar wind during the Whole Sun Month (Carrington Rotation 1913 from 1996 August 22 to September 18), and compare the resulting charge state distributions with in situ measurements made with the Solar Wind Ion Composition Spectrometer (SWICS) on Ulysses. We trace the wind trajectory back to 20$R_\odot$ u…
We aim to investigate the distribution function of $\langle Q_{Fe}\rangle$ at 1AU to check if it corresponds to a bimodal wind. We use data from SWICS instrument on board the ACE spacecraft along 20 years. We propose the bi-Gaussian function as the probability distribution function that fits the $\langle Q_{Fe}\rangle$ distribution. We study the evolution of the parameters of the bimodal distribution with the solar cycle. We compare the outliers of the sample with the existing catalogues of ICMEs and identify new ICMEs. The $\langle Q_{Fe}\rangle$ at 1 AU shows a bimodal distribution related t…
The power spectrum of the evolving solar wind shows evidence of a spectral break between an inertial range of turbulent fluctuations at higher frequencies and a "$1/f$" like region at lower frequencies. In the ecliptic plane at $\sim 1$ AU, this break occurs approximately at timescales of a few hours, and is observed in the power spectra of components of velocity and magnetic field. The "$1/f$" energy range is of more direct coronal origin than the inertial range, and carries signatures of the complex magnetic field structure of the solar corona, and of footpoint stirring in the solar photosph…
We analyze in situ measurements of solar wind velocity obtained by Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft and Helios spacecraft during the years 1998-2012 and 1975-1983 respectively. The data belong to mainly solar cycle 23 (1996-2008) and solar cycle 21 (1976-1986) respectively. We use Directed Horizontal Visibility graph (DHVg) algorithm and estimate a graph functional, namely, the degree distance (D) as the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) argument to understand time irreversibility of solar wind time series. We estimate this degree distance irreversibility parameter for these time…
We study the properties of 115 coronal holes in the time-range from 2010/08 to 2017/03, the peak velocities of the corresponding high-speed streams as measured in the ecliptic at 1 AU, and the corresponding changes of the Kp index as marker of their geo-effectiveness. We find that the peak velocities of high-speed streams depend strongly on both the ar- eas and the co-latitudes of their solar source coronal holes with regard to the heliospheric latitude of the satellites. Therefore, the co-latitude of their source coronal hole is an im- portant parameter for the prediction of the high-speed st…
We present an examination of the First Ionization Potential (FIP) fractionation scenario invoking the ponderomotive force in the chromosphere, and its implications for the source(s) of slow speed solar winds by using observations from The Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE). Following a recent conjecture that the abundance enhancements of intermediate FIP elements, S, P, and C, in slow solar winds can be explained by the release of plasma fractionated on open fields, though from regions of stronger magnetic field than usually associated with fast solar wind source regions, we identify a period…
We present a concept study of a solar wind forecasting method for Earth, based on persistence modeling from STEREO in-situ measurements combined with multi-viewpoint EUV observational data. By comparing the fractional areas of coronal holes (CHs) extracted from EUV data of STEREO and SoHO/SDO, we perform an uncertainty assessment derived from changes in the CHs and apply those changes to the predicted solar wind speed profile at 1AU. We evaluate the method for the time period 2008-2012, and compare the results to a persistence model based on ACE in-situ measurements and to the STEREO persisten…
We present an empirical model based on the visible area covered by coronal holes close to the central meridian in order to predict the solar wind speed at 1 AU with a lead time up to four days in advance with a 1hr time resolution. Linear prediction functions are used to relate coronal hole areas to solar wind speed. The function parameters are automatically adapted by using the information from the previous 3 Carrington Rotations. Thus the algorithm automatically reacts on the changes of the solar wind speed during different phases of the solar cycle. The adaptive algorithm has been applied t…
Interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs) are magnetic structures propagating from the Sun's corona to the interplanetary medium. With over 20 years of observations at the L1 libration point, ACE offers hundreds of ICMEs detected at different times during several solar cycles and with different features such as the propagation speed. We investigate a revisited catalog of more than 400 ICMEs using the superposed epoch method on the mean, median, and the most probable values of the distribution of magnetic and plasma parameters. We also investigate the effects of the speed of ICMEs relative …
The variability inherent in solar wind composition has implications for the variability of the physical conditions in its coronal source regions, providing constraints on models of coronal heating and solar wind generation. We present a generalized prescription for constructing a wavelet power significance measure (confidence level) for the purpose of characterizing the effects of missing data in high cadence solar wind ionic composition measurements. We describe the data gaps present in the 12-minute ACE/SWICS observations of O7+/O6+ during 2008. The decomposition of the in-situ observations …
One of the most interesting discoveries of the X-ray Telescope and EUV Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) on board the Hinode solar observatory is the presence of persistent high temperature high speed outflows from the edges of active regions. Measurements by EIS indicate that the outflows reach velocities of 50 km/s with spectral line asymmetries approaching 200 km/s. It has been suggested that these outflows may lie on open field lines that connect to the heliosphere, and that they could potentially be a significant source of the slow speed solar wind. A direct link has been difficult to establish,…
The acceleration of charged particles by interplanetary shocks can drain a non-negligible fraction of the upstream ram pressure. For a sample of shocks observed in-situ at 1 AU by the ACE and Wind spacecraft, time-series of the non-Maxwellian components (supra-thermal and higher-energy) of the ion and electron energy spectra were acquired for each event. These were averaged for one hour before and after the time of the shock passage to determine their partial pressure. Using the MHD Rankine-Hugoniot jump conditions, we find that the fraction of the total upstream energy flux transferred to non…
We examine the radial evolution of correlation lengths perpendicular (\(λ_C^{\perp}\)) and parallel (\(λ_C^{\parallel}\)) to the magnetic-field direction, computed from solar wind magnetic-field data measured by Parker Solar Probe (PSP) during its first eight orbits, Helios 1, Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE), WIND, and Voyager 1 spacecraft. Correlation lengths are grouped by an interval's alignment angle; the angle between the magnetic-field and solar wind velocity vectors (\(Θ_{\rm BV}\)). Parallel and perpendicular angular channels correspond to angles \(0^{\circ}~<~Θ_{\rm BV}~<~40^{\cir…
This Letter capitalizes on a unique set of total solar eclipse observations, acquired between 2006 and 2020, in white light, Fe XI 789.2 nm ($\rm T_{fexi}$ = $1.2 \pm 0.1$ MK) and Fe XIV 530.3 nm ($\rm T_{fexiv}$ = $ 1.8 \pm 0.1$ MK) emission, complemented by in situ Fe charge state and proton speed measurements from ACE/SWEPAM-SWICS, to identify the source regions of different solar wind streams. The eclipse observations reveal the ubiquity of open structures, invariably associated with Fe XI emission from $\rm Fe^{10+}$, hence a constant electron temperature, $\rm T_{c}$ = $\rm T_{fexi}$, in…
This analysis offers evidence of characteristic scale sizes in solar wind charge state data measured in-situ for thirteen quiet-sun Carrington rotations in 2008. Using a previously established novel methodology, we analyze the wavelet power spectrum of the charge state ratio C$^{6+}$/C$^{4+}$ measured in-situ by ACE/SWICS for 2-hour and 12-minute cadence. We construct a statistical significance level in the wavelet power spectrum to quantify the interference effects arising from filling missing data in the time series (Edmondson et al. 2013), allowing extraction of significant power from the m…
This paper presents results of comparison between observations of coronal holes in the UV (SOHO EIT) and microwave emission (17, 5.7 GHz, 327 and 150.9 MHz, NoRH, SSRT and Nancy radioheliographs), and solar wind parameters, according to the ACE spacecraft data over the period 12 March--31 May 2007. Increase in the solar wind velocity up to ~600 km/s was found to correlate with decrease in the UV flux in the central parts of the solar disk. The connection between parameters of the microwave emission at three different solar atmosphere levels and the solar wind velocity near the Earth's orbit wa…
The acceleration of charged particles by interplanetary shocks (IPs) can drain a non-negligible fraction of the plasma pressure. In this study, we have selected 17 IPs observed in-situ at $1\,\text{au}$ by the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) and the Wind spacecraft, and 1 shock at $0.8\,\text{au}$ observed by Parker Solar Probe (PSP). We have calculated the time-dependent partial pressure of supra-thermal and energetic particles (smaller and greater than $50\,\text{keV}$ for protons and $30\,\text{keV}$ for electrons, respectively) in both the upstream and downstream regions. The particle …
The solar wind originating from coronal holes is comparatively well-understood and is characterized by lower densities and average charge states compared to the so-called slow solar wind. Except for wave perturbations, the average properties of the coronal-hole solar wind are passably constant. In this case study, we {ocus on observations of the Solar Wind Ion Composition Spectrometer (SWICS) on the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) of individual streams of coronal-hole solar wind that illustrate that although the O and C charge states are low in coronal-hole wind, the Fe charge distribution…
The SWICS instrument aboard the ACE satellite has detected frequent intervals in the slow solar wind and interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs) in which C6+ and other fully stripped ions are strongly depleted, though the ionization states of elements such as Si and Fe indicate that those ions should be present. It has been suggested that these outlier or dropout events can be explained by the resonant cyclotron heating process, because these ions all have the same cyclotron frequency as He2+. We investigate the region in the corona where these outlier events form. It must be above the i…
Knowledge about the background solar wind plays a crucial role in the framework of space weather forecasting. In-situ measurements of the background solar wind are only available for a few points in the heliosphere where spacecraft are located, therefore we have to rely on heliospheric models to derive the distribution of solar wind parameters in interplanetary space. We test the performance of different solar wind models, namely Magnetohydrodynamic Algorithm outside a Sphere/ENLIL (MAS/ENLIL), Wang-Sheeley-Arge/ENLIL (WSA/ENLIL), and MAS/MAS, by comparing model results with in-situ measuremen…
We present and discuss the strong correspondence between evolution of the emission length scale in the lower transition region and in situ measurements of the fast solar wind composition during this most recent solar minimum. We combine recent analyses demonstrating the variance in the (supergranular) network emission length scale measured by SOHO (and STEREO) with that of the Helium abundance (from WIND) and the degree of Iron fractionation in the solar wind (from the ACE and Ulysses). The net picture developing is one where a decrease in the Helium abundance and the degree of Iron fractionat…
We investigate the characteristics and the sources of the slow (< 450 km/s) solar wind during the four years (2006-2009) of low solar activity between Solar Cycles 23 and 24. We use a comprehensive set of in-situ observations in the near-Earth solar wind (Wind and ACE) and remove the periods when large-scale interplanetary coronal mass ejections were present. The investigated period features significant variations in the global coronal structure, including the frequent presence of low-latitude active regions in 2006-2007, long-lived low- and mid-latitude coronal holes in 2006 - mid-2008 and mo…
Can Alfvénic Fluctuations Affect the Correlation and Complexity of Magnetic Fields in Magnetic Ejecta? A Case Study Based on Multi-Spacecraft Measurements at 1~au
To explore the difference between the most two recent solar minima, we analyze the in-situ ACE and ULYSSES observations and examine the distributions of the three types of solar wind (streamer-stalk-associated wind, wind from outside the streamer stalk that can be associated, in part, with coronal holes, and interplanetary coronal mass ejections). We use the taxonomy provided by Zhao et al. (2009) to identify the three types of solar wind. We then map the in-situ observations to the 2.5 solar radii surface. With the aid of the potential-field-source surface model (PFSS), we calculate the norma…
Alfvén-wave-driven 3D magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) models, which are increasingly used to predict stellar wind properties, contain unconstrained parameters and rely on low-resolution stellar magnetograms. We explore the effects of the input Alfvén wave energy flux and the surface magnetogram on the wind properties predicted by the Alfvén Wave Solar Model (AWSoM). We lowered the resolution of two solar magnetograms during solar cycle maximum and minimum using spherical harmonic decomposition. The Alfvén wave energy was altered based on non-thermal velocities determined from a far ultraviolet (FUV)…
We analyze in situ measurements of solar wind velocity obtained by the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft during the solar activity cycle 23. We calculated a robust complexity measure, the permutation entropy (S) of solar wind time series at different phases of a solar activity cycle. The permutation entropy measure is first tested on the known dynamical data before its application to solar wind time series. It is observed that complexity of solar wind velocity fluctuations at 1 AU shows hysteresis phenomenon while following the ascending and descending phases of the activity cycle…
For the past 30+ years, the magnetic expansion factor ($f_s$) has been used in empirical relationships to predict solar wind speed ($v_{obs}$) at 1 AU, based on an inverse relationship between these two quantities. Coronal unipolar streamers (i.e. pseudostreamers) undergo limited field line expansion, resulting in $f_s$-dependent relationships to predict fast wind associated with these structures. However, case studies have shown that in situ observed pseudostreamer solar wind was much slower than that derived with $f_s$. To investigate this further, we conduct a statistical analysis to determ…
This research provides an analysis of extreme events in the solar wind and in the magnetosphere due to disturbances of the solar wind. Extreme value theory has been applied to a 20 year data set from the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft for the period 1998-2017. The solar proton speed, solar proton temperature, solar proton density and magnetic field have been analyzed to characterize extreme events in the solar wind. The solar wind electric field, vB$_{z}$ has been analyzed to characterize the impact from extreme disturbances in the solar wind to the magnetosphere. These extreme…
We identify coronal holes using a histogram-based intensity thresholding technique and compare their properties to fast solar wind streams at three different points in the heliosphere. The thresholding technique was tested on EUV and X-ray images obtained using instruments onboard STEREO, SOHO and Hinode. The full-disk images were transformed into Lambert equal-area projection maps and partitioned into a series of overlapping sub-images from which local histograms were extracted. The histograms were used to determine the threshold for the low intensity regions, which were then classified as co…
Here we aim to separate the two main contributions of slow and fast solar wind that appear at 1 AU. The Bi-Gaussian function is proposed as the probability distribution function of the two main components of the solar wind. The positions of the peaks of every simple Gaussian curve are associated with the typical values of every contribution to solar wind. We used the entire data set from the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) mission in an analysis of the data set as a whole and as yearly series. Solar cycle dependence is considered to provide more accurate results for the typical values of t…
One of the goals of machine learning is to eliminate tedious and arduous repetitive work. The manual and semi-automatic classification of millions of hours of solar wind data from multiple missions can be replaced by automatic algorithms that can discover, in mountains of multi-dimensional data, the real differences in the solar wind properties. In this paper we present how unsupervised clustering techniques can be used to segregate different types of solar wind. We propose the use of advanced data reduction methods to pre-process the data, and we introduce the use of Self-Organizing Maps to v…
Some of local sources of the slow solar wind can be associated with spectroscopically detected plasma outflows at edges of active regions accompanied with specific signatures in the inner corona. The EUV telescopes (e.g. SPIRIT/CORONAS-F, TESIS/CORONAS-Photon and SWAP/PROBA2) sometimes observed extended ray-like structures seen at the limb above active regions in 1MK iron emission lines and described as "coronal rays". To verify the relationship between coronal rays and plasma outflows, we analyze an isolated active region (AR) adjacent to small coronal hole (CH) observed by different EUV inst…
Aims. We study the 27-day variations of galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) based on neutron monitor (NM), ACE/CRIS, STEREO and SOHO/EPHIN measurements, in solar minima 23/24 and 24/25 characterized by the opposite polarities of solar magnetic cycle. Now there is an opportunity to reanalyze the polarity dependence of the amplitudes of the recurrent GCR variations in 2007-2009 for negative A < 0 solar magnetic polarity and to compare it with the clear periodic variations related to solar rotation in 2017-2019 for positive A > 0. Methods. We use the Fourier analysis method to study the periodicity in th…
The development of knowledge of how the coronal origin of the solar wind affects its in situ properties is one of the keys to understanding the relationship between the Sun and the heliosphere. In this paper, we analyse ACE/SWICS and WIND/3DP data spanning >12 years, and test properties of solar wind suprathermal electron distributions for the presence of signatures of the coronal temperature at their origin which may remain at 1AU. In particular we re-examine a previous suggestion that these properties correlate with the oxygen charge state ratio O7+/O6+; an established proxy for coronal elec…
Evidence for inhomogeneous heating in the interplanetary plasma near current sheets dynamically generated by magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence is obtained using measurements from the ACE spacecraft. These coherent structures only constitute 19% of the data, but contribute 50% of the total plasma internal energy. Intermittent heating manifests as elevations in proton temperature near current sheets, resulting in regional heating and temperature enhancements extending over several hours. The number density of non-Gaussian structures is found to be proportional to the mean proton temperature a…
A novel technique is presented for describing and visualizing the local topology of the magnetic field using single-spacecraft data in the solar wind. The approach merges two established techniques: the Grad-Shafranov (GS) reconstruction method, which provides a plausible regional two-dimensional magnetic field surrounding the spacecraft trajectory, and the Partial Variance of Increments (PVI) technique that identifies coherent magnetic structures, such as current sheets. When applied to one month of Wind magnetic field data at 1-minute resolution, we find that the quasi-two-dimensional turbul…
We present an application of the stereoscopic self-similar-expansion model (SSSEM) to Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO)/Sun-Earth Connection Coronal and Heliospheric Investigation (SECCHI) observations of the 03 April 2010 CME and its associated shock. The aim is to verify whether CME-driven shock parameters can be inferred from the analysis of j-maps. For this purpose we use the SSSEM to derive the CME and the shock kinematics. Arrival times and speeds, inferred assuming either propagation at constant speed or with uniform deceleration, show good agreement with Advanced Composi…
We investigate the evolution of a well-observed, long-lived, low-latitude coronal hole (CH) over 10 solar rotations in the year 2012. By combining EUV imagery from STEREO-A/B and SDO we are able to track and study the entire evolution of the CH having a continuous 360$°$ coverage of the Sun. The remote sensing data are investigated together with in-situ solar wind plasma and magnetic field measurements from STEREO-A/B, ACE and WIND. From this we obtain how different evolutionary states of the CH as observed in the solar atmosphere (changes in EUV intensity and area) affect the properties of th…
This article implements a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based deep learning model for solar-wind prediction. Images from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) at 193Ȧ wavelength are used for training. Solar-wind speed is taken from the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) located at the Lagrangian L1 point. The proposed CNN architecture is designed from scratch for training with four years' data. The solar-wind has been ballistically traced back to the Sun assuming a constant speed during propagation, to obtain the corresponding coronal intensity data from AIA images. This forecasting sch…
As the solar wind propagates through the heliosphere, dynamical processes irreversibly erase the signatures of the near-Sun heating and acceleration processes. The elemental fractionation of the solar wind should not change during transit however, making it an ideal tracer of these processes. We aimed to verify directly if the solar wind elemental fractionation is reflective of the coronal source region fractionation, both within and across different solar wind source regions. A backmapping scheme was used to predict where solar wind measured by the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) originat…
We investigate the spatial correlation properties of the solar wind using simultaneous observations by the ACE and WIND spacecraft. We use mutual information as a nonlinear measure of correlation and compare this to linear correlation. We find that the correlation lengthscales of fluctuations in density and magnetic field magnitude vary strongly with the solar cycle, whereas correlation lengths of fluctuations in B field components do not. We find the correlation length of |B| ~ 120 Re at solar minimum and ~ 270 Re at maximum and the correlation length of density ~ 75 Re at minimum and ~ 170 R…
Seeking to establish whether active region upflow material contributes to the slow solar wind, we examine in detail the plasma upflows from Active Region (AR)10978, which crossed the Sun's disc in the interval 8 to 16 December, 2007 during Carrington rotation (CR)2064. In previous work, using data from the Hinode/EUV Imaging Spectrometer, upflow velocity evolution was extensively studied as the region crossed the disc while a linear force-free magnetic extrapolation was used to confirm aspects of the velocity evolution and to establish the presence of quasi-separatrix layers at the upflow sour…
The ratio of the rms electron density fluctuations to the background density in the solar wind (density modulation index, $ε_{N} \equiv Δ{N}/N$) is of vital importance in understanding several problems in heliospheric physics related to solar wind turbulence. In this paper, we have investigated the behavior of $ε_{N}$ in the inner-heliosphere from 0.26 to 0.82 AU. The density fluctuations $Δ{N}$ have been deduced using extensive ground-based observations of interplanetary scintillation (IPS) at 327 MHz, which probe spatial scales of a few hundred km. The background densities ($N$) have been de…
The solar wind is a structured and complex system, in which the fields vary strongly over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. As an example, the turbulent activity in the wind affects the evolution in the heliosphere of the integral turbulent scale or correlation length [λ], usually associated with the breakpoint in the turbulent-energy spectrum that separates the inertial range from the injection range. This large variability of the fields demands a statistical description of the solar wind. In this work, we study the probability distribution function (PDF) of the magnetic autocorrel…
Suzaku detected an enhancement of soft X-ray background associated with solar eruptions on 2013 April 14-15. The solar eruptions were accompanied by an M6.5 solar flare and a coronal mass ejection with magnetic flux ropes. The enhanced soft X-ray background showed a slight variation in half a day and then a clear one in a few hours. The former spectrum was composed of oxygen emission lines, while the later one was characterized by a series of emission lines from highly ionized carbon to silicon. The soft X-ray enhancement originated from geocoronal solar wind charge exchange. However, there ap…
In order to address the growing need for more accurate space weather predictions, a new model named EUHFORIA (EUropean Heliospheric FORecasting Information Asset) was recently developed (Pomoell and Poedts, 2018). We present first results of the performance assessment for the solar wind modeling with EUHFORIA and identify possible limitations of its present setup. Using the basic EUHFORIA 1.0.4. model setup with the default input parameters, we modeled background solar wind (no coronal mass ejections) and compared the obtained results with ACE, in situ measurements. For the need of statistical…
Identifying coronal sources of L1 solar wind disturbances using the Fisk heliospheric magnetic field and potential field extrapolations during three solar minima
Coronal holes (CHs) are regions of open magnetic flux which are the source of high speed solar wind (HSSW) streams. To date, it is not clear which aspects of CHs are of most influence on the properties of the solar wind as it expands through the Heliosphere. Here, we study the relationship between CH properties extracted from AIA (Atmospheric Imaging Assembly) images using CHIMERA (Coronal Hole Identification via Multi-thermal Emission Recognition Algorithm) and HSSW measurements from ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) at L1. For CH longitudinal widths $Δθ_{CH}<$67$^{\circ}$, the peak SW velo…
The space weather is extremely mild during solar cycle 24: the number of major geomagnetic storms and high-energy solar energetic particle events are at the lowest since the dawn of the space age. Solar wind measurements at 1 AU using Wind and ACE instruments have shown that there is a significant drop in the density, magnetic field, total pressure, and Alfven speed in the inner heliosphere as a result of the low solar activity. The drop in large space weather events is disproportionately high because the number of energetic coronal mass ejections that cause these events has not decreased sign…
