Momentum Coupling Between Coronal Mass Ejections and the Solar Wind

Details Momentum Coupling Between Coronal Mass Ejections and the Solar Wind Momentum Coupling Between Coronal Mass Ejections and the Solar Wind

Dec 2001

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001agufmsh12a0740c&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2001, abstract #SH12A-0740

Physics

2111 Ejecta, Driver Gases, And Magnetic Clouds, 2164 Solar Wind Plasma, 7513 Coronal Mass Ejections

Scientific paper

The interaction of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and the ambient solar wind plays a critically important role in determining the CME acceleration near the Sun and the subsequent evolution through the interplanetary medium. In particular, the speed and the magnetic field of associated magnetic clouds at 1 AU are dependent on the momentum transfer from the CME to the solar wind (SW) during the transit. Theoretically, because of the high magnetic Reynold's number, turbulent drag has been used to model the integrated drag (retarding or accelerating depending on the velocity differential) force on CMEs exerted by the SW (Chen 1996). The drag coefficient has been previously estimated to be of order unity using a 2-D MHD simulation of flux-rope interactions with an ambient magnetizid plasma consistent with SW conditions near 1 AU (Cargill et al. 1996). Such treatments posit that the momentum coupling between a flux rope and the ambient plasma is proportional to (V-Vsw)2, where V is the speed of the flux rope and Vsw is the ambient SW speed. Recently, Gopalswamy et al. (2001) found that the observationally inferred drag force is approximately quadratic in CME speed, based on 61 decelerating CME events. In this paper, we examine specific events using LASCO data and determine the drag coefficient: for each event, we measure the speed-height profile and the minor radius at the leading edge; then using a model of the coronal density and SW outflow speed, estimate the drag coefficient. Work supported by ONR and NASA. Chen, J., JGR, 101, 27499, 1996 Cargill, P. J., J. Chen, D. S. Spicer, and S. T. Zalesak, JGR, 101, 4855, 1996. Gopalswamy, N., S. Yashiro, M. L. kaiser, R. A. Howard, and J.-L. Bougeret, in press, JGR, 2001.

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