Three-dimensional reconstructions of the early November 2004 Coordinated Data Analysis Workshop geomagnetic storms: Analyses of STELab IPS speed and SMEI density data

J. Geophys. Res. 113, A00A11, 2008

Three-dimensional reconstructions of the early November 2004 Coordinated Data Analysis Workshop geomagnetic storms: Analyses of STELab IPS speed and SMEI density data

M.M. Bisi, B.V. Jackson, P.P. Hick and A. Buffington
Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, Univ. California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

D. Odstrcil
Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
Space Weather Prediction Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Boulder, CO, USA

J.M. Clover
Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, Univ. California San Diego, La Jolla, CA

Abstract

Combined interplanetary scintillation (IPS) and Solar Mass Ejection Imager (SMEI) remote-sensing observations provide a view of the solar wind at almost all heliographic latitudes and covering distances from the Sun between 0.1 AU and 3.0 AU. They are used to study the development of the solar wind and coronal transients as they move out into interplanetary space, and also the inner heliospheric response to the passage of corotating solar structures and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). The observations take place in both radio scintillation level and speed for IPS, and in Thomson-scattered white light brightness for SMEI. With colleagues at the Solar Terrestrial Environment Laboratory (STELab), Nagoya University, Japan, we have developed a data analysis system for the STELab IPS data which can also be applied to SMEI white light data. This employs a three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction technique that obtains perspective views from solar corotating plasma and outward flowing solar wind as observed from the Earth by iterative fitting of a kinematic solar wind model to the data. This 3-D modeling technique permits reconstructions of the density and speed of CMEs and other interplanetary transients at relatively coarse spatial and temporal resolutions. For the time-dependent model (used here), these typically range from 5° to 20° in latitude and longitude, with a 1/2 to 1 day time cadence. For events during early November 2004 we compare these reconstructed structures with in situ measurements from the ACE and Wind (near-Earth) spacecraft to validate the 3-D tomographic reconstruction results and provide input to the ENLIL 3-D magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) numerical model.