Three-Dimensional Simulations of Solar Wind Preconditioning and the 23 July 2012 Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejection
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Three-Dimensional Simulations of Solar Wind Preconditioning and the 23 July 2012 Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejection Ravindra T. Desai1 · Han Zhang2 · Emma E. Davies1 · Julia E. Stawarz1 · Joan Mico-Gomez3 · Pilar Iváñez-Ballesteros4 Received: 23 January 2020 / Accepted: 3 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Predicting the large-scale eruptions from the solar corona and their propagation through interplanetary space remains an outstanding challenge in solar- and helio-physics research. In this article, we describe three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the inner heliosphere leading up to and including the extreme interplanetary coronal mass ejection (ICME) of 23 July 2012, developed using the code PLUTO. The simulations are driven using the output of coronal models for Carrington rotations 2125 and 2126 and, given the uncertainties in the initial conditions, are able to reproduce an event of comparable magnitude to the 23 July ICME, with similar velocity and density profiles at 1 au. The launch time of this event is then varied with regards to an initial 19 July ICME and the effects of solar wind preconditioning are found to be significant for an event of this magnitude and to decrease over a time-window consistent with the ballistic refilling of the depleted heliospheric sector. These results indicate that the 23 July ICME was mostly unaffected by events prior, but would have traveled even faster had it erupted closer in time to the 19 July event where it would have experienced even lower drag forces. We discuss this systematic study of solar wind preconditioning in the context of space weather forecasting. Keywords Interplanetary coronal mass ejections · Magnetohydrodynamics · Solar wind · Disturbances · Space weather
This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Towards Future Research on Space Weather Drivers Guest Editors: Hebe Cremades and Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla
B R.T. Desai
[email protected]
1
Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, London, UK
2
Department of Physics, University of Durham, Durham, UK
3
Departamento de Física, Universitat de Valéncia, Valéncia, Spain
4
Departamento de Física, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
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1. Introduction Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are characterized by the large-scale eruption of plasma from the solar corona and release copious amounts of energy over incredibly short time periods. Upon reaching interplanetary space, CMEs, hereafter referred to as interplanetary CMEs (ICMEs), can propagate at velocities significantly greater than the ambient solar wind and will therefore be decelerated due to drag forces (Cargill et al., 1996). In recent years, the phenomenon of an initial ICME clearing the path for a successive eruption has been implicated as a significant causal mechanism for producing some of the most severe space weather events on record (Liu et al., 2019). There is therefore a current need to understand how solar wind preconditioning can affect an observed C
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