Based on the area of coronal holes, we develop an empirical model of the quiet solar wind flow and compare the model results with in-situ data of the solar wind measured by ACE and Wind. We will systematically study the effects of sporadic but strong interactions, due to coronal mass ejections (CMEs), that highly disturb the flow and may compress and accelerate solar wind streams, and make detailed studies on the feedback between CMEs and ambient solar wind flow on short time scales as well as over the entire solar cycle. The goal of the study is to provide a better understanding of the spatial and temporal evolution of the background solar wind speed and density, to be used for a better modeling of the propagation of CMEs on their way to Earth.
We gratefully acknowledge the support by NAWI Graz.
Project members:
Reiss Martin (PhD student), Manuela Temmer (PI)
Start of the project: January 2014 (duration: 2.5 years)
© M. Temmer 7/2015
Details on the algorithm and image extraction method are described in
Rotter et al., 2015 (Solar Physics, 290, 1355).
Improvements on the coronal hole detection algorithm using supervised classification can be found in Reiss et al., 2015 (SWSC, in press).