Space Weather: Inferring the Speeds of Earth-Directed Coronal Mass Ejections Using HeI 1083nm Velocity Observations

University Corporation For Atmospheric Res, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

Determining the speeds of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) is very important for determining when a CME on the solar disk will impact the Earth. The head-on speed of a CME is very difficult to measure directly and this project will investigate the possibility of using measurements of the associated filaments to determine the speed of the CME. Observations in the Helium I (HeI) emission at 1032 nm will be used for this purpose. The data will be obtained from the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory. The HeI 1083 nm data will then be compared with data from the Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment (LASCO) on the SOHO satellite. In addition, the project will use magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations of the propagation of CMEs to help refine the predicted Earth impact times.