Solar Flare and Geomagnetic Storm Effects on the Thermosphere and Ionosphere During September 2017

Qian, Liying

Solar Flare and Geomagnetic Storm Effects on the Thermosphere and Ionosphere During September 2017

Wednesday, 13 February 2019

Fountain III/IV (Westin Pasadena)

Liying Qian¹, Wenbin Wang², Alan Geoffrey Burns², Phillip C Chamberlin³, Anthea Coster⁴, Shunrong Zhang⁴ and Stanley C Solomon⁵, (1)NCAR High Altitude Observatory, Boulder, CO, United States, (2)NCAR, Boulder, CO, United States, (3)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (4)MIT Haystack Observatory, Westford, MA, United States, (5)National Center for Atmospheric Research, High Altitude Observatory, Boulder, CO, United States

Abstract:

The period September 6 – 11, 2017 was an active period in which multiple solar flares and a major geomagnetic storm occurred. The two largest flares, an X9.3 and an X8.2 flares, were a disk flare and a limb flare. We conduct model simulations and data analysis to examine solar flare effects on the coupled thermosphere and ionosphere (TI) system in connection with flare location effects, and to investigate the occurrences of traveling atmosphere disturbances (TADs) due to solar flares and geomagnetic storms. The general circulation model that we use is the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Thermosphere-Ionosphere-Electrodynamics General Circulation Model (TIE-GCM). Daily and solar flare spectra estimated by the Flare Irradiance Spectral Model (FISM) are used to provide the solar irradiance input for TIE-GCM. The data that we use are the electron density data observed by the incoherent scatter radar (ISR) at Millstone Hill, GPS total electron content (TEC) data, and thermosphere mass density data derived from the precise orbit determination data from satellite-based GPS receivers. The GPS receivers are those onboard the 3 satellites of the Swarm constellation: Swarm A, Swarm B, and Swarm C.